


Mayday

by cthulhu_is_chaotic_good



Category: Alex Rider - Anthony Horowitz
Genre: Gen, Mission Fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 08:00:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 49,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27347779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cthulhu_is_chaotic_good/pseuds/cthulhu_is_chaotic_good
Summary: When Alex is rescued from an almost certain death by a man who was supposed to be dead, the outcome seems obvious: say thank you, and take a hopefully short boat ride to safety. Of course, MI6 has a habit of complicating matters.
Comments: 173
Kudos: 202





	1. Shallow Cuts

Note: This is set right before Nightshade, assuming Nightshade wasn’t directly led into from the previous book. Basically, just assume that in Never Say Die, it ended with Mrs. Jones knowing she wouldn’t really give Alex a choice if she thought she needed him again, but without any specific mission in mind. Alex, on the other hand, leaves Never Say Die the same as the book ended – with Jack alive, and believing that Jones would give him a choice in future missions.

* * *

Alex had read once that madness could be defined as doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results. If that was the case, Alex was certifiably insane.

He shouldn’t have said yes, either to this mission or any in the past. They almost all brought him to a similar position at some point in the journey: being tortured by a villain, uncertain if he was going to survive, and (although he’d like to deny it) ready to give up just about anything to avoid the almost certainly grizzly fate awaiting him if he resisted.

And why had he agreed to this mission? It had to have been impulsiveness. Mrs. Jones had given him the choice to refuse the mission as she’d promised, but Alex had possessed a stupid need to help from the moment the problem was described to him. Mrs. Jones probably even would have left him alone if he’d said no.

He hadn’t said no. He could have enjoyed his Autumn Break in peace, and instead he was tied to a chair off without a jacket in a cold Argentinian Spring dawn. He could have been playing football with Tom and his other mates, instead of trying to bring down an international weapon smuggling ring.

Jack had told him he was idiot for this. She was, of course, right.

“Look here!” Missing Tooth commanded, with a thick Argentinian accent.

Reluctantly, Alex did. The man who was glaring at him wasn’t a pleasant sight. Moments ago, Missing Tooth hadn’t seemed to have a missing tooth – now, he did. And the man seemed to know exactly who was to blame.

It hadn’t been Alex’s fault, not really. Alex had been in bed, on his fifth night aboard the ship. It was one of those traveling cruise ships where rich students went to school while travelling around the world, and so far the journey had been exactly what Alex suspected of a boarding school cruise ship for the children of the world’s elites. (It was amazing how rarely rich students seemed to just attend a normal school, Alex had decided sometime in his first 30 minutes on board the ship).

Yes, Alex had known that the ship was supposed to dock in Argentina that night, but he had been asleep. He hadn’t intended to start poking around the moment the ship docked. He would have been more than happy to wait until morning for his investigation.

But something had gone wrong. (Not that it was a surprise – something always went wrong). The moment Alex had felt himself being shaken awake, with a strange voice asking if he was Alex Rider, he had known something was deeply wrong and that he needed to act then.

Alex had managed to knock out the man (now known as Missing Tooth) who had woken him up and slipped out of his bedroom without anyone else spotting him, but he had known he would need to get off the ship if he could and call the other agent on board as soon as possible.

Getting off the ship had been the easy part. Getting off the dock without being grabbed by two armed men – that had been significantly more difficult, to the point where it hadn’t happened.

And now he was tied up in a building off the dock. His jacket lay in the corner; he had been told to take it off before they tied him to the chair.

Missing Tooth continued glaring. “You are Alex Rider, yes?”

Alex glared back. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Although he knew a conversational Spanish, Alex didn’t know the dialect these men had been speaking in. But after a few seconds, he had a fairly good guess as to the meaning of the command issued by Missing Tooth to the armed men who had grabbed him: _punch him._

“Go again?” Missing Tooth asked, while Alex’s vision came back to him.

“I don’t know who you are, but I’m not who you’re looking for,” Alex said, changing tactics. “Please. I just go to school on that ship. I don’t know him, this person you’re looking for.”

The same command was uttered; once again, Alex was punched. Alex gasped. He didn’t think a rib had been broken, but he wasn’t sure.

“Alex Rider.” Missing Tooth said.

“No.” Alex shook his head faintly. “I don’t know who that is,” he repeated.

“You wait one minute,” the man said. “Then, you will say you are Alex Rider.”

What did that mean?

But the man’s meaning was clear far too soon, when the door opened and in walked Mr. Brown, a teacher from the cruise ship school.

Except Mr. Brown wasn’t Mr. Brown at all, but a British spy who’d been introduced to Alex as Thomas Mattley. And Thomas Mattley didn’t look surprised to see Alex tied to a chair.

“This is Alex Rider, yes?” asked Missing Tooth.

“Yes,” Mattley agreed.

Alex should have seen it earlier. He should have known something was wrong. Mrs. Jones had told Alex that one of the reasons she needed him was she needed two agents she could absolutely trust on the ship – information that the CIA and MI6 had been hearing had been getting intercepted all the while fake information on the smuggling ring had been being returned to the intelligence agencies. Mattley had interrogated Alex on what he knew on the trip to where they boarded the ship. Mattley hadn’t let Alex out of his sight on the ship whenever they’d been together, and Mattley had come up with a series of excuses to check in on Alex or have Alex report to his classroom, all seemingly without any reason. And the whole time Mattley had been wearing a watch that seemed somewhat out of place for what had to be the salary range of an MI6 agent.

Mattley wasn’t here under duress, being coerced into giving up Alex. Mattley had never intended to let Alex get a chance to investigate the smugglers, because the older agent was on their pay roll.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alex said, a minute too late. Missing Tooth looked at Mattley with a wise smirk.

“He doesn’t give up, does he?” Mattley marveled. “It makes sense. Alex here is the child of a spy, and raised by another spy, from what I’ve been able to find out. He had a lot to do with taking down SCORPIA. It might be worth it to keep him alive after this, as collateral. Or sell him to someone.”

Missing Tooth shrugged and replied in Spanish. The conversation that followed passed in the Argentinian Spanish too quickly for Alex to try to make sense of it. In the meantime, Alex struggled with the ropes binding his legs and hands to the arms and legs of the chair. There wasn’t any give, and after a few seconds he gave up the futile struggle.

By the end of the conversation, Missing Tooth was smiling broadly. Whatever the men had decided, it didn’t appear good for Alex.

The older agent snapped, and Alex’s eyes jumped to the man. “Tell us what MI6 knows,” Mattley asked.

Alex shrugged, as best as the ropes tying him to the chair would let him. “You probably know more than I do.”

“Let’s compare notes.”

“My teachers always told me not to let others cheat.”

Mattley sighed. “This will hurt a bit if you want to keep resisting.”

“Maybe if you had paid more attention earlier in the trip, you’d already know what I know.”

“Believe me, I kept track of what you told me. But how do I know you aren’t holding something back? Maybe Jones told you to watch me, and you’ve been doing that this entire time?”

“It’s possible,” Alex replied. “Or that I’m recording you right now with a secret camera.”

“I don’t think you are, but it’s possible.” Mattley smiled. “Let’s find out.”

He held out a hand to one of the men holding guns. The man offered the gun to Mattley, and Mattley shook his head and made a comment in Spanish that set the hairs on the back of Alex’s neck standing up straight: “El cuchillo.”

The knife.

“I wanted to practice this, but I haven’t had many people I could use,” Mattley said. “I was watching a video the other day on making shallow cuts…deep enough to hurt, no doubt, maybe even enough to need stitches. But not deep enough to kill someone. I think perhaps we’ll try it out.”

The sky outside – from what little Alex could see of it, from the small window set high up in the wall – was just barely turning pink with light when Mattley started his questions. The morning sun was traveling high up in the sky when a man came into the room with a message and Mattley paused.

The man passed the message on in Spanish, apparently unconcerned by the bleeding and crying teenager tied up in the back of the room, and then left. Mattley put the knife down with a small smile.

“Some of the men we’re here to investigate have arrived, Alex. Do you think you’re ready to meet a few of them?”

Alex bit his lip, hard, and refused to speak. None of the men around him looked bothered.

“I’ll be back,” Mattley promised.

He wasn’t gone long. Alex waited, shivering slightly in the chilled room, watching the other three men in the room either ignore him or, in Missing Tooth’s case, sneer at him with a look of lingering sadism in his eyes. Alex could look down at his arm but, considering he couldn’t do anything to help now, he decided it was best to avoid it.

Well, Alex decided a moment later. It probably was madness that had made Alex take this mission, because he was now officially mad. And the evidence was in the fact that he was seeing dead men.

Mattley walked back into the room, followed by a short man who somewhat resembled a middle-aged Jackie Chan, and then by Yassen Gregorovich.

“You caught a spy?” Yassen asked, his eyes locked onto Alex.

“I was given a spy, by Jones. She thought his help would prove invaluable. Gentlemen, meet renowned spy Alex Rider.”

“We’ve met,” Yassen said, before breaking eye contact with Alex and changing the conversation to Spanish.

Yassen was supposed to be dead. And yet here he was, in the flesh, looking exactly as calm as he had been every time Alex had seen him – even when the man was – supposedly – bleeding to death on the floor of Air Force One. His air was still close cropped and blond, his eyes blue, and there was still a faint scar line on one side of his neck.

Alex closed his eyes tightly and opened them again, convinced that there was some mistake. Either this man was someone else, or Alex was dreaming. Or Jones had lied.

It was a twisted but ultimately rather straightforward puzzle – which was more likely: that zombies existed, that men could be raised from the dead and whatever power controlled it had wasted their energies on a hitman, or that MI6 had lied to Alex (again)?

“What did he tell you?”

The conversation was back in English again, and once again Yassen’s attention was on Alex. “What does MI6 know?”

“Very little, if I’m believing him.” Mattley held his knife out again, and gave a small brandish. “I’m about to double check his stories though.”

“Whatever he says will be limited by what MI6 told him,” Yassen pointed out.

“Yes, but he knew a bit. I could tell you, but if he tells me I’ll catch anything he’s lying about.” Mattley walked up to Alex. “Start at the beginning. What did Jones tell you?”

Alex had tried to resist for a while before, but there hadn’t been much point, considering Mattley knew as much as Alex did anyway. Now, with another trained interrogator in the room, it seemed even more pointless to waste time cursing out Mattley and everyone else. Quietly, Alex started at the beginning, and retold what he knew.

“That's not enough,” Yassen remarked at the end. “They would need more to find us.”

“I hope not,” Alex muttered. Yassen glanced at him without comment, and in the background Missing Tooth glowered.

Mattley did neither of those things. Instead, he put the knife next to Alex’s arm. Alex bit his lip again and realized that his lip was bleeding. “Don’t be smart,” Mattley said, and drew the blade quickly across Alex’s arm.

Alex tried to jerk away but the rope held him in place as he gasped in pain. On his arm, he could feel a fresh well of blood start to trickle down his arm, crossing the other 3 methodical cuts.

He was going to need a lot of stitches if he survived this.

“I don’t think he knows anything else,” Mattley said. “We asked him enough questions already to cover everything.”

Yassen raised an eyebrow. “I can tell.”

Alex risked a glance down at his arm and immediately wished his hadn’t. Blood was still welling from the 2 cuts that hadn’t been hastily tied up in fabric cut from his jacket, and his entire upper arm was dyed red.

What did it say of Alex’s life that at this point, this wasn’t the worst pain he’d gone through?

“What we do with him?” Missing Tooth asked. “I can get rid of him.”

“Maybe you should keep him alive. He’ll be worth something to someone,” Mattley said.

Yassen shook his head. “He’ll be worth something to someone alive if you can keep him restrained and out of trouble. All of SCORPIA wasn’t enough to do that, and you have few men in any one place. If he gets free to even make a phone call, you will be in trouble.”

Alex must not have been worth that much alive, because Mattley appeared to accept that easily enough. “Disposal then. Or maybe a shot through the head, and then I take him back to MI6 and tell of some masked men that abducted him before I found his body.”

“I’ll take care of him,” Yassen said. “Him and I have our own business to settle. We’ll deal with that, and then he will not be a concern to your operation again.”

“Fine,” Mattley said. “Deal with him this morning, and get the boxes loaded later.” The older agent moved to Alex with the knife. “I’ll get him loose.”

“Wait,” Missing Tooth said. He smiled. “We have some business to settle as well. Give me the knife.”

“We have things to do today,” Yassen said. There was a note of annoyance in his tone.

Missing Tooth took the knife from Mattley. “This will be quick.”

It wasn’t quick.

By the end Alex was openly crying again, trying to squirm out of Mattley’s and the chair’s hold while Missing Tooth _slowly_ opened three more cuts, deeper than the first set, on Alex’s arm.

“I’m done,” the man said eventually. He slashed at the ropes binding Alex’s legs to the chair, leaving a faint cut in the pant leg of Alex’s pajamas, and then he slightly more carefully cut through the bindings on Alex’s arms.

“He’ll bleed out soon like this,” Mattley observed. “I hope you don’t want long to reckon with him.”

Yassen was impossible to read. “If he gets blood all over my boat, I’ll send you a bill.”

The middle-aged Jackie Chan look-alike picked up the shreds of Alex’s jacket lying on the floor and handed them to Alex. Alex, numb, used his right hand to hold the jacket around his left arm.

After Yassen exchanged a few more words in Spanish with the other men in the room, he put a hand on Alex’s left shoulder, two centimeters away from the top cut, and propelled him forward out of the room.

Alex knew the symptoms of shock well enough. He’d dealt with them a fair few times after barely getting rescued or rescuing himself from seemingly impossible situations. But this was different – he wasn’t safe, his arm was slashed to pieces, and he could tell that blood was leaving his body. He didn’t have _time_ to be in shock.

But he was forced into the chilled air of early spring and he realized that his body didn’t care what he had time for. He was shaking, and he was cold, and suddenly all he could think was that he had promised to watch the newest Sherlock Holmes movie with Jack and she wouldn’t realize for the longest time that he wouldn’t be home to do it. Alex’s face felt wet and he realized, distantly, that he was probably still crying.

Not many people were walking around on the dock, and no one seemed to pay much attention to them.

“Faster,” Yassen said.

Walk faster? Walk faster to where? Alex didn’t know where they were going, and what was the point in walking faster when he was just going to be killed? Alex stopped, suddenly, looking around for the ship he’d arrived in, and Yassen yanked him forward by the shoulder.

The ship they arrived at was not the _Fer de Lance_. Alex couldn’t see the name of the ship, but this one was probably twice the size of the boat Yassen had been traveling by in the South of France.

Alex stopped again, this time trying to plant his feet into the ground. He had to get home to Jack. Somehow, however he did it, it had to happen. “Please,” Alex said, faintly.

Yassen stopped too. He looked at Jackie Chan and said something in another language, Alex couldn’t focus on what, and then Yassen let go of Alex’s shoulder and went to the ship, disappearing inside.

Alex took a step backwards, still holding his jacket around his left arm with his right hand.

Jackie Chan reached for something at his waist.

Alex stopped, defeated. There was no point in running. Better to wait and see if he could maybe escape later than get shot down already.

Only a minute later Yassen reappeared. Someone was following him.

Alex took a second step back and stopped, realizing that even if Jackie Chan had been bluffing about being armed, Yassen certainly would not be.

The man behind Alex was a bearded and brown-haired man with a furrowed brow. He caught sight of Alex and stopped himself.

The man swore. It sounded from the word as if he were also from a Spanish speaking country. “How old is he?”

“Fifteen.” Yassen beckoned Alex forward. “He needs help now.”

Alex, reluctantly, staggered a few steps forward. The bearded man rushed forward as well, and put a hand around his shoulders. “Come on, get in. I can help.”

The man propelled Alex up through the yacht and through a thin hallway into a restroom with a bath. He semi-pushed Alex onto the edge of the bath before he knelt beside him and reached for the jacket around Alex’s arm. “Let me see.”

Yassen appeared in the doorway while the man, aghast, looked at Alex’s arm.

“He’s going to need several stitches now. Can you do it?” Yassen asked.

The man opened the drawer under the sink. There were towels and a large medical kit underneath. The man reached for the medical kit, then opened it and looked inside. “Yes, and I have what I need, but it will take time.”

“Do it. Get me when you’re done.” Yassen left.

The stitches hurt.

Either there wasn’t anything for the pain on board or Alex didn’t get any, but it hurt. A lot. And it wasn’t quick. The man worked diligently on Alex’s arm quietly while Alex tried to hold still, hold his bloodied jacket around the parts of his arm that hadn’t been stitched yet, and not panic about what had happened so far this morning and whose boat he was on.

Twenty-one stitches later and the man announced he was done. He wet a clean towel that was under the sink and patted down Alex’s arm, clearing away the dried blood. Then he looked at Alex, and grabbed another towel. He ran water over it, then handed it to Alex. “Wash your face.”

Alex did. When he was done, he looked up to see the man staring at him.

“Thanks,” Alex said quietly.

“Yeah,” the man muttered. “Stay here.”

The man left the bathroom. Alex took a deep, ragged breath, and stood up. He walked to the doorway and paused to listen before stepping out into the hallway.

He didn’t hear anything.

Cautiously, Alex stepped out into the hallway. He didn’t see anyone.

Alex suppressed some shivers and then took quiet steps towards the way he remembered coming in. He was almost at the end of the hallway when the bearded man stepped out into the hallway right in front of him, followed a step later by Yassen. The bearded man looked up at Alex.

Alex’s eyes flickered between the two. With new stitches in his arm, he couldn’t do anything. Even without the stitches he doubted he could have taken on Yassen, let alone two men. He froze.

“Hey, hey hey,” the bearded man said. “You’re alright, ok?” The man took a step forward and put two hands out in the air in front of him. “You’re safe, believe me. You’re safe.”

“In here,” Yassen said, stepping back through the doorway. The bearded man stayed where he was in the hallway, blocking the way out of the yacht.

Without any real choice, Alex followed Yassen.

Half of the room was a kitchen, and the other half was a table with bench seats against the wall and two chairs. Yassen took one of the chairs and turned it away from the table. He glanced at Alex and nodded at the chair.

Alex sat down.

The bearded man entered the room, a frown on his face. “I did as best I could. They’ll take a few weeks to heal, and then someone can take them out.”

Yassen nodded and put a hand on Alex’s left arm lightly. He traced one of the stitched cuts with his thumb while Alex sat, tense.

“How much does it hurt?” Yassen asked.

 _A good deal_. Alex shrugged with his right shoulder. Yassen wordlessly dropped his hand.

“Find him something clean to wear,” Yassen instructed. The bearded man left while Alex looked down and realized his clothes hadn’t survived the early morning unscathed.

“Don’t want to get blood on your boat, do I?” he muttered.

“I’m not worried about that.”

The man reappeared with a pair of black joggers and a light grey t-shirt. He handed them to Alex. Alex accepted them, almost flinching as he reached out with his left arm without thinking.

“Go change,” Yassen said.

Down the hall back in the restroom where he’d been stitched up, Alex checked to make sure the door was locked behind him, and put the clothes on counter.

And then, finally, he was alone with a mirror. Alex, reluctantly, glanced at his reflection.

He was pale, and his eyes were, while not red, tinged slightly pink. But his face wasn’t really what he wanted to look at.

He took in his left arm.

Credit where credit was due. The bearded man had made it look a lot better than Alex suspected it had looked before, from what he’d seen of it and the pain he’d felt. It still wasn’t a pretty sight, but it could have been worse. Thankfully, while most of the wounds had been deep enough to need stitches, a few had only needed one or two, and overall, Alex doubted they would leave scars. Not most of them, anyway.

Assuming he was leaving this ship alive, but that seemed more and more likely by the moment.

Sighing, Alex dropped his eyes to where he’d been sitting while getting stitched up.

There was more blood on the edge of the bath and the floor surrounding it than he’d realized. The bloodied remnants of his jacket were still in the bath. Someone would have a mess to clean up.

It was more of a pulling sensation than pain as Alex moved his arm while changing. It didn’t feel _good_ , of course. He’d still gone through worse.

Alex tossed his old clothes into the bath with the shreds of jacket before heading back to the kitchen. The bearded man was standing in the hall outside the kitchen waiting, and followed Alex inside.

Yassen was standing against the wall next to the table, arms folded. When he didn’t say anything, Alex sat back down in the chair.

“Does he want coffee or tea?” the bearded man asked.

“No,” Yassen said. “Not now. I have business to attend to. He needs to be out of the way.”

“He doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere.”

“There are ways to be more certain.” Yassen crossed to the kitchen side of the room and opened a cabinet. He took out some rope and returned to Alex.

“Put your hands behind the chair.”

Alex did. For once, he wasn’t preparing to try any tricks to keep ropes loose. He felt rope close around his wrists and bind them together.

“Watch him. I’ll be back in a few hours.” Yassen left without a backwards glance.

The bearded man pulled the other chair across from Alex and then took a seat himself. He frowned, taking in the sight of Alex tied up, and then gave a grim chuckle. “Well, this doesn’t help what I told you before, does it.” When Alex didn’t respond, the man nodded. “You are safe though. Believe me.”

Alex fixed his gaze at a point on the wall, and the man subsided into silence. As time passed, Alex felt his thoughts drift back home.

Before Alex had left for this mission, Jack had told him that she expected he’d keep busy on the cruise boat. He wasn’t, according to her, to spend all his time eating and enjoying the sun. Jack would have a heart attack if she heard about this morning, but at least Alex could tell her he’d kept busy. Waking up at dawn, having conversations with armed men for hours, seeing a dead man, and then seeing a nurse before lunchtime – hardly a vacation!

Not that Jack would hear this. Assuming Alex got back home alive, he wasn’t telling any of this to her except what he absolutely had to. And then, after that, he was quitting MI6. Forever.


	2. Safety

The bearded man didn’t let Alex sit alone in his thoughts for long – perhaps for the best. Alex still wasn’t sure he was going to survive this particular misadventure, and any distraction from the pain that was becoming general soreness in his arm ought to be welcomed.

“My name’s David,” Bearded man said. “I’d offer you a hand to shake, but, you know,” he said, looking at Alex.

“Yeah, I’m a bit tied up at the moment,” Alex agreed.

“You know you’re safe, yes?” David asked, repeating the line he’d said moments ago. “I know I said it before, but you didn’t look too certain.”

Alex grimaced. He would believe he was safe the moment he was at home, unharmed more than he already was. Until then, matters _were_ uncertain.

“I’m assuming you’re from London, because if anything happens, that’s where I’m supposed to drop you off.”

“Is something supposed to happen?”

David waved his hands in front of himself while frowning. “No. Nothing will happen. But if it does, I was given clear directions. Drop you off in London.”

“Directions from who?”

“My boss.”

“Does your boss have a name?”

The bearded man frowned. “The man who brought you in. You know his name, or you don’t. That’s not my business.”

Alex let out a breath. “I know it.”

_The man who brought you in. I was given clear directions. Drop you off in London._

Yassen hadn’t killed him yet. Maybe, despite all the damage Alex had done to his former employers, Yassen didn’t care about all of that.

It was too soon to be hopeful, Alex told himself. Too soon to be certain that another danger wasn’t just around the corner.

David must have read his expression as something other than the almost relief Alex was feeling, because he leaned forward intently. “Do you want to be in London?”

“Yes,” Alex admitted.

“London’s home?”

“Yes.” There wasn’t much point denying it. His accent would give it away easily enough, anyway.

“Then be happy! You’ll be home soon, with your parents. It will be good.” David stood at that, and went across the room to fill a kettle with water. “I can give you some tea, even tied up like you are, if you want.”

“No, thanks.”

David dismissed Alex’s response with a hand wave. “I’ll make tea, anyways. It’s good after treating wounds. And probably good for you that you’re sitting still right now. Don’t want you getting light-headed after blood loss.”

Alex listened as the kettle slowly heated up and then eventually whistled its announcement that the water was ready. David prepped two mugs of tea, and then headed to the doorway. “I’ll be right back. Don’t wander off anywhere, now.”

Alex tugged on the ropes binding his hands together. After a second it was clear that another end of the rope must have been tied into the wood bars of the chair – Alex couldn’t just stand up and walk away.

He could probably, if he maneuvered carefully enough, break the chair that he was sitting on. If David was still on board though, he would hear it, and then Alex would be running, injured, with both hands still bound behind his back, into a dock that had at least a handful of people who knew him.

The idea would have failed in its early stages, however, because David was back as soon as Alex had the thought. “We have internet at port,” he announced, setting a laptop on the table, behind Alex. “You want to watch anything while we wait?”

“I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

Alex felt two hands by his shoulders, and then felt the chair under him turning around. David finished rotating Alex to face the laptop, and let go of the chair. “Lots of great stuff out there. And you’re going to be waiting a while, I think. Might as well enjoy it.”

Nothing that David put on would make Alex _enjoy_ being tied up in a criminal’s boat, but there were probably some shows or sport matches that would make it less tortuous. “You have any Chelsea matches?”

“Football? I can find some.”

Halfway through the second match, Alex was starting to doze off when he heard talking in Spanish somewhere in distance.

David glanced towards the front of the yacht. “A few more minutes now. By the end of this game we’ll probably be setting sail again.”

The conversation outside continued while Alex strained to catch anything. David, noticing that Alex was distracted, leaned forward, and turned the volume up on the game. “You don’t want to listen to that,” he said.

The conversation outside subsided minutes later, followed by occasional words shouted in Spanish. Once there was a thud of something falling not far away – perhaps by the entrance of the boat.

Boxes? Was something being brought on board? If so, it had to be weapons, like Mrs. Jones had said, unless it was the drugs that were apparently tied in with the smuggling routes.

At one point a man – one Alex hadn’t seen before – entered the room. He looked at Alex without interest, grabbed an apple from the fridge, and left.

“Who was that?” Alex asked. “Is he traveling with you?”

“Watch the game,” was David’s only response.

True to David’s prediction, the game had only just ended when Yassen entered the room, entering Alex’s field of vision as he approached the table.

“We’re ready?” David asked.

Yassen nodded. He took a seat on the bench attached to the wall and glanced at the laptop.

“We’ve been watching Chelsea matches,” David offered. Yassen glanced at Alex wordlessly.

“Apparently I’m getting dropped off in London,” Alex said. He stared at Yassen. _Was it true?_

Yassen turned the laptop to face himself, and tapped the touchpad a few times. The sound of another match started on the screen, and Yassen turned the laptop back to face Alex.

That wasn’t an answer. Alex set his jaw and stared at Yassen once more, refusing to look at the laptop.

Yassen, apparently, didn’t care. He stood up. “I’ll deal with him once we’re out of port.”

Alex followed Yassen’s departure with his eyes until the man was out of the room and David stepped into Alex’s line of sight, smiling a weak smile. “It’s alright. Just time for more football, ok?”

Soon after, the view outside the pair of circular windows began to slowly change from what it had been – a part of an adjacent boat – to the view of the sky with a few boats in the distance as the yacht they were on began to pull out into the Atlantic Ocean.

Yassen entered the room again moments after the crowd on the screen went silent as the internet connection stopped.

David reached out and closed the laptop. “The path set for tonight and tomorrow?”

Yassen nodded and returned to his previous seat on the bench. A moment later his clear blue eyes were once again settled on Alex.

“I could untie him now,” David offered.

“Later,” Yassen dismissed.

“What, is he going to run and jump into the ocean? He’s not going to swim to shore in the freezing water. Not with that arm, on top of everything else.”

Reluctantly, Alex agreed, David was right. Alex couldn’t swim 10 minutes in these waters, let alone the at least 20 minutes they were offshore by now.

“Probably not.”

David made a considering noise, glancing at Alex. “Did anyone mention what he’d done to end up like this?”

“Ask him.”

Alex shook his head before he was asked. He hadn’t done anything. _This time._ Even if he had, he didn’t need his allegiances broadcast to everyone he ran into. Especially when they were likely hardened criminals.

David ran a hand through his beard then nodded. “He’s too young to be involved in this.”

Neither Yassen nor Alex responded to that, and the man sighed. “Everything else was good? No funny business?”

Yassen answered in a string of Spanish with a heavy dialect that Alex couldn’t follow, and David replied in kind. The two carried out a conversation in quick Spanish, with David doing most of the speaking and Yassen replying in short phrases. Yassen continued to watch Alex all the while, leaving Alex feeling as if he was under an interrogation he hadn’t anticipated and didn’t know how to prepare for.

Eventually, the conversation broke. Yassen broke eye contact with Alex to pull a phone from his pocket and glance at it for a short second.

“We should be far from shore now,” David said, this time in English.

Yassen shrugged before reaching in his pocket and pulling out a pocketknife. Alex tensed. Yassen stood and move behind Alex.

“Hold still,” Yassen said, and for a second Alex felt a hand hold his right wrist. It then it was gone and Yassen was sitting back down, the knife nowhere in sight.

Alex pulled his hands in front of him and crossed his arms.

“Coffee or tea now?” David asked.

“Sure.”

“Which one?”

“Tea, if you have English breakfast and milk.”

“Come look,” David invited, walking to the nearest cabinet, and opening it up. Alex glanced at Yassen and, seeing the man wasn’t even looking at him, he walked over as well.

The familiar envelope for a popular brand of tea was one of the options inside, and Alex pulled it out.

“I’ll boil a fresh pot,” David said, filling up a pot with water.

“Thanks.”

Alex wandered closer to the windows. Outside he could only sea ocean and a few boats far in the distance. “We’re out of port,” he said.

“Yes,” David said, clearly not following. Yassen, in contrast, looked over.

“You said you’d deal with me then,” Alex said.

“I did.”

“Is this boat headed straight North East to London, then? You can drop me off there and I won’t complain.”

“We’ll get you home, don’t worry,” David appeased.

“Will you? When? How? Because unless you’re going far out of your way to drop me off, I doubt it. And I doubt you have time to cross the ocean to drop me at home when smuggling weapons or drugs!”

David’s smile vanished.

“Don’t worry,” Alex addressed Yassen. “I don’t know anything I didn’t tell you already. I don’t know what you have on board, but I know it’s not legal.”

“I’m going to go check on something,” David said into the momentary silence. “Watch the pot until I’m back.” And he left, leaving Alex feeling as if his only somewhat ally had vanished.

“And what do you propose?” Yassen asked when it was just the two of them.

“I don’t know,” Alex said. _Please don’t kill me._ “Drop me off somewhere. I’ll say I never saw you. I won’t let Mrs. Jones know I know you’re alive. I’ll come up with something else, I swear.”

“But you do know that the agent you were with has his own allegiances,” Yassen pointed out.

“Why do you care?”

“If the current shipment of goods my ship is currently carrying is known by certain intelligence, then when I arrive at the next ports that I am expected in, I can expect that certain authorities will be waiting.”

“I won’t tell them anything,” Alex lied.

“You won’t tell MI6 that one of their agents tried to have you killed?”

Alex would tell them as soon as he could. They both knew that.

“Then what was the point?” Alex asked.

“Of?”

“Getting my arm stitched up. If killing me is the best solution, you could have done that without helping me.”

“Alex,” Yassen said, calmly. “There is not any version of this situation that we are in where you end up dead. Do you understand that?”

Had he heard correctly?

“Turn the heat down.” Yassen nodded at the kettle of water. Alex moved to do so, inwardly flinching after he at first reached out with his injured arm. He pulled his left arm back and used his right arm to turn down the heat.

“You’re not going to kill me,” Alex confirmed.

“I think we both agree that it would be a waste of my time to have you stitched up and then throw you overboard.”

“It’s not the most efficient use of time, no.”

Yassen frowned. “That doesn’t change the problem of you being here now. I haven’t decided yet when and how you’re getting home. But at some point, before the month’s up, you should be home.”

He counted quickly in his head. The end of the month was in a week and half. 10 days. That wasn’t much longer than MI6 had estimated the mission to be at its longest, and Yassen had said that was the latest point he would be home by. “What about the agent from MI6?”

“Like I said, if the _current_ shipment of goods I am carrying is expected, it will cause problems.”

Oh. Current. If the next shipment of goods had nothing to do with the traitor in MI6’s ranks, it wouldn’t impact Yassen and his crew whatsoever.

“Is weapons smuggling really the best use of what you know?” Alex asked before his brain caught up with his mouth.

Yassen raised an eyebrow. “Don’t worry about what you don’t know.”

Great. That probably meant the ‘weapons’ were codename for ‘plutonium’ or something similarly risky. This was beyond just gun running. Which, considering this boat had looked more like a rich man’s yacht than a carrier boat, made sense. Whatever was being smuggled here was in a small quantity that could be hidden under the guise of a ship for travelling. And it was surely dangerous, expensive, or both.

That realization must have shown on Alex’s face, based on the glance Yassen gave him.

The whistling of a steaming kettle interrupted them, and Alex turned to turn off the heat and find a cup to pour the hot water into.

“Don’t cause problems.” Yassen said finally, as Alex stared into his mug of tea.

Maybe. It depended on what was being smuggled.

“I just want to go home,” Alex promised.

It was impossible to tell if Yassen believed him. “Does your arm still hurt?”

“Somewhat.”

“Look in the cabinet over the sink.”

Alex found the cabinet being referred to and opened it. On the first shelf were several medicine bottles, a couple in English. Alex reached for the first one that promised pain relief.

“I couldn’t have one before?” Alex asked. He could think of a moment or two earlier in the day where painkillers would have been appreciated. While he was sitting through a series of stitches, for example.

“You had been bleeding out for a while. It was better to wait.”

Alex glanced at the recommended dosage, then got two pills from the bottle before replacing it in the cabinet.

“Thanks,” Alex said, quietly. “For helping.”

Yassen didn’t respond, which was just as well. Footsteps were approaching the room.

“Everything good?” David called out as he entered the room. “You’re both good?”

“Yes.” Yassen stood and started to leave the room. “Watch him for a moment.”

David appeared relieved. “He’s safe with me.”

“Can I get a glass of water?” Alex asked David. His tea was too hot to wash down the medication with.

“There’s bottled water here.” David tapped at a cupboard in the wall. “Water isn’t usually safe to drink on boats.”

“That’s fine.” Alex grabbed a bottle of water and washed down the pills.

“Alex,” Yassen said from the doorway. He was wearing a waterproof jacket, and holding another one in his arm. “Come here.”

Alex went to the hall and accepted the extra layer. “I’m guessing put it on?”

Yassen nodded and led the way towards how they’d entered the yacht as soon as Alex had his jacket on.

It was windy and cold outside, and the sky above was more grey than blue. Alex stood for a moment right outside the door staring out at the water before he realized Yassen probably was still expecting him to be following.

Jackie Chan look-alike was apparently steering the boat because he was the only person on the bridge until Yassen and Alex entered.

The two men had a short conversation and Yassen took control of the ship while Jackie Chan closed the door solidly behind him.

“Should I sit down?” Alex said, grabbing one of the two seats against the wall. “Am I staying here?”

“I suspect I will have less problems if you are close to an adult while on this ship.”

“I never got to drink my tea,” Alex said.

“You can make more later.”

The next while passed in silence, with only the ocean and occasional other ships in view. Yassen had never appeared to Alex a talkative man, and he didn’t seem inclined to break that habit now. And Alex didn’t necessarily have a lot to say to Yassen either. As appreciative as he was for the aid, they weren’t on the same side. A quiet peace between the two was probably better than talking and discovering some other reason their differences set them apart.

Alex watched the waves bobbing in the distance and thought of home and other things, and eventually the sky started to darken at the edges while Alex felt his eyes start to slip closed. And suddenly Alex was being lightly shaken on his good arm, and it was dark outside.

“I’m awake,” Alex said, as his eyes adjusted to the light of the bridge. Another stranger, a man with either dark blond or light brown hair, was at the captain’s seat facing forward. Yassen was next to Alex, implacable as ever. He’d have been the hand on his shoulder. “Is there something to eat?” Alex asked, once he was awake enough to stand.

“Yes,” Yassen said, holding the door for Alex.

Outside, the wind howled. It was colder than during the gray light of day, and Alex shivered even in his jacket as he walked down the stairs and to the door to the rest of the boat.

Inside the kitchen, David was talking to the man who had entered the kitchen for an apple earlier in the day. On the kitchen counter there were three plates full of food. One, Alex supposed, was for him.

“How many people are on board?” Alex asked.

“Five, and you,” David said. “Did you get some sleep?”

Alex yawned in response. “I’m going to the restroom.”

No one objected and Alex walked back to the restroom he’d been in earlier. Inside, he wasn’t surprised to see that his bloodied clothes were gone, the room was cleaned of blood, and the room smelled of bleach. If you were smuggling _something_ over international waters, you probably wouldn’t want your bath area looking as if someone had been violently murdered in it.

On his way back to the kitchen, Alex looked down the hallway and counted the number of doors – five, including the bathroom and kitchen on one wall and three yet unknown rooms on the other. On one end of the boat the hallway curved out of sight, although Alex knew that soon as you rounded the corner you were outside on the boat’s deck. On the other end of the boat, the hallway ended in a staircase going downstairs.

“You don’t have any allergies, do you?” David asked once Alex was back in the kitchen. Yassen, Alex noticed, wasn’t in the room, and one of the plates of food was gone.

“There’s no penicillin in the food, is there?” Alex asked.

David laughed. “No, it’s medicine free.”

“That’s a shame. I could use another painkiller.”

“You’re too young to drink,” the unknown man said. He, unlike David, didn’t sound to be from a Spanish speaking country. If Alex was any judge from faintest hints of an accent, this man was from East Africa.

“What?” Alex asked.

“A painkiller is a drink,” David said helpfully. “But yes, you’re too young to drink. Now, Alex, right?” When Alex nodded slightly, David continued. “Alex, meet Kofi.”

“Hi,” Alex said.

Kofi nodded, then resumed his conversation in Spanish with David. Alex went to grab a plate of food, and then he took a seat at the table.

Alex was mostly done with his rice and fish when Kofi left the kitchen. David smiled at Alex. “You look a lot better.”

“Sure,” Alex said. He stopped himself from saying that it was amazing what knowing you weren’t about to be killed could do to a person.

“You believe me now that you’re safe?”

_Ish._ “Sure,” Alex replied again.

David took that in stride. “You’ll see. We don’t harm children on this boat.”

Had this man even met Yassen? Had he met the other men on the crew who hadn't seemed the least bit concerned to see a tied up teenager on board?

“Good to know,” Alex said eventually, before finishing the final bite of food.

“Well, I’m on putting you to sleep duty tonight, I think. Well, I volunteered. I thought you might be too old for a bedtime story, but I’ll give you one if you do want one anyhow.”

A bedtime story?

“Do you have kids?” Alex asked, on impulse.

“Yes,” David answered. “She’s a fair bit younger than you. She’s the light of my life as they say.”

Something in Alex’s stomach twisted, although he wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe because this man was risking his life as a smuggler and yet was sitting here next to Alex, proudly declaring his daughter as ‘the light of his life’. Maybe it was the thought of Yassen probably knowing that David had a child. David acted as if he didn’t even realize the danger his daughter was in just by having her existence known by men like Yassen.

_Did_ David realize the danger his family could be in should something go wrong?

Did David even know _exactly_ what was going on?

“I’m sure she’s great,” Alex said through the pit in his stomach.

“She is.” The man stood up. “If you’re done, follow me. There’s a couch you can sleep on down the hall.”


	3. The Call

It must have been too early in the morning for the sun to rise when Alex woke up in the almost dark, pulling the one blanket covering him even tighter around him in the suddenly chilly living area. The leather material of the couch under him felt cold. His arm hurt. Alex shivered and sat up.

It was easy to see what had woken him. Jackie Chan must have drawn guard duties, as he was sitting at the other end of the long couch. And the tv was on. It was an older Chinese movie, and though the volume was low, it was still on.

“Hi,” Alex said blearily. Jackie Chan ignored him.

Alex sighed and settled in to watch the movie.

They were far into the romantic subplot of the movie when a timer went off. Jackie Chan stretched, turned off the television with the remote, and went to the hallway doorway. A moment later Alex heard a few words muttered, and then Jackie Chan headed to the right – either to the kitchen or the bridge.

“You’re up early,” Yassen said, from the hallway.

“Apparently it was movie time.” Not that Alex was the least bit resentful. “Does someone have an extra sweater or something warm?”

Yassen nodded, and took in Alex, curled under the blanket as much as possible. “Everyone on this ship speaks English well enough. Did you ask for another blanket?”

“Your Jackie Chan imposter ignored me when I said hi,” Alex said. “Either he doesn’t speak English, or he doesn’t like talking to me.”

“The second one, I’d imagine. Wait there.” Yassen reappeared moments later with a navy jumper and an even thicker blanket, which he tossed to Alex from the door.

“Thanks.” Alex grabbed the jumper and dragged it on, making a face as he felt his stitches when moving his arm. “Don’t suppose I get to go back to sleep later, do I?”

“You can go back to sleep now if you want. Don’t leave the area.”

“Or piranhas will eat my eyes, or something similarly dreadful?”

Yassen was nonplussed. “I’m going to make coffee. I’ll make you a cup if you want it.”

“I’ll get some in a bit.” Alex pulled the blankets over him and tried to fall back asleep, but after a few minutes of tired rest that didn’t seem to end, he dragged himself out of ‘bed’ and to the kitchen for coffee.

Yassen was making eggs when Alex entered the kitchen. Alex poured himself a cup of coffee and drank it slowly in silence on the bench, while eyeing a workbook that was sitting on the table. It was some sort of Japanese workbook, but as there was nothing but Japanese on the cover Alex couldn’t read any of it.

“Do you want something to eat?”

Alex shrugged, then realized that was a pointless gesture when Yassen was turned away cooking. “I guess. I’m more interested in if there’s a spare toothbrush.”

“There are extras of most things in the hallway closet. You’re free to look for one.”

Alex almost left the room before realizing he didn’t know which door was the closet. At this point he knew three of the doors in the hall led to an entertainment/living room, the kitchen, and a restroom, but he didn’t want to open a door expecting a closet only to wake one of the crew. “Which door is the closet?”

“It’s across from the stairs.”

There were a few toothbrushes, and toothpaste to boot. And 2 more blankets, among other supplies. Alex grabbed a thing of toothpaste and a toothbrush and headed to the restroom. A few minutes later and he was feeling more awake than he had any right to be at roughly four thirty in the morning.

There were eggs that Alex assumed were for him on the table when he returned. He’d eat them in a minute. Alex grabbed his cup of coffee and went to the cabinet to grab some more pills. Two was probably recommended, although five seemed right, from how sore his arm felt. Alex took two with a sip of coffee and pretended it was a fistful of pills.

Yassen was now working in the Japanese workbook, attention seemingly fixed on the book in front of him.

Somehow Alex didn’t doubt that if he left the room, it wouldn’t go unnoticed.

What time was it in England now? Probably late enough that Jack would be awake.

“I have to borrow your phone for a minute,” Alex said.

“No.”

“Just for a minute,” Alex promised. “It’s important. And nothing confidential – you can listen in. I just need to call my housekeeper, so she doesn’t think I’m dead.”

“She probably will think you’re dead.”

Alex’s heart began to pick up speed. “Right. Because Mattley told MI6 I’m dead, or I’ve been kidnapped, or something else awful. But I’m not dead, and she needs to know that.”

Yassen looked up for the first time. “She doesn’t. It will be much better for me if the world does spend a week or two thinking you’re dead.”

“For _you_ ,” Alex said. “Not me. And she’d already had times she thought I was dead, and I just got her back from SCORPIA. She needs to know I’m alive.”

“Count her upset under perils of working for the intelligence world.”

_Just because Yassen had no one to care about him when he was supposed to be dead didn’t mean Alex was in the same situation._

“You can listen in,” Alex said, already expecting the answer.

“And you could be speaking in code. No.” Yassen studied Alex’s face for a moment. “Don’t ask again.”

\--

The day passed slowly. David joined Alex on the couch after morning properly set in, and it must have been clear that Alex was feeling upset, because David immediately patted Alex on the shoulder and reassuring him that everything was going to be alright. David apparently had some DVDs of the American show Friends, and he took the Chinese movie disc out of the player so that Alex could see something he enjoyed.

The distraction was better than nothing, but it wasn’t much. Jack was going to think Alex was dead. And she’d just gotten free of the twins. She wouldn’t be able to put up with all of this – even though Alex was intending to quit, she might not even stay.

Sometime after David popped out for a while to make them both sandwiches for lunch, Yassen appeared, workbook in hand, and took a seat in the armchair next to the couch.

“Everything’s good,” David said as he reentered the room with two plates. “Alex has been watching tv with no problems.”

Yassen nodded and continued to work on his workbook without looking up.

“Hope you like tuna,” David said as he handed Alex the plate. “And actually, put my plate next to you. I’ll be back for it in a minute. I forgot my phone next door.”

Alex carefully kept his face neutral while he passed the second plate down the couch.

David was back from the kitchen a moment later, emptyhanded. “Did I leave my phone in here?”

“I haven’t seen it,” Alex said. He put his plate next to him and stood up. “I can help you look though.”

“Sit down,” Yassen said without looking up.

“I’ll be with him,” David dismissed. “He won’t get up to anything.”

“He won’t, because he’ll be sitting there until your phone is found.”

David shrugged. “If you want.”

Alex watched David head out of the room back to the kitchen. Alex reached for his sandwich and took a bite, chewing it without tasting.

“This can take as long as you want,” Yassen said, still working on his Japanese.

Alex didn’t bother to deny it.

Neither of them said anything when David stopped by the room to grab his sandwich to say he would find his phone later, and to tell him if either of them saw it.

Several episodes of Friends had passed before Alex gave up.

“I’m running to the restroom,” Alex said, leaving the phone on the couch behind him before the man could say anything.

Later, when David entered the room, his phone was on the coffee table.

“Where was it?” David asked, picking it up.

“Where you left it,” Yassen said. “Alone, with Alex.”

David turned a surprised expression at Alex before he recovered. “It doesn’t seem to have been a problem.”

“This time it wasn’t. Don’t leave your phone lying around again.”

“It wouldn’t have been serious anyway, I think,” David said in the silence broken otherwise only by a background laugh track. “There’s no cell service out here last I checked, and even if there was. He probably just wanted to call his parents to say he was alright.”

“I think that is highly unlikely.”

The world lurched.

Alex stood up. “Is there some danger with me going outside? Am I going to _find trouble_ if I go out?”

“No.”

“Great.” And Alex left the room.

\--

“Are you going to follow him?” David asked, after a minute of quiet silence.

Gregorovich shook his head. “No.”

“He might be in trouble.”

“He might be cold, since he went outside without his shoes or a jacket. Is he in trouble? No.”

“He needs someone to tell him everything is all right.”

“Considering why he is upset, I sincerely doubt that person is me.”

“Do you mind if I cheer him up?”

Gregorovich turned the page in his workbook. “You’re free to try.”

“You knew him before now - any words of advice?”

His boss met his gaze a moment. “Bring him the extra jacket he left in the kitchen. It’s windy outside.”

Right. David headed to the kitchen to grab the jacket the boy had been wearing last night, and then head out to the deck to find the teenager. Maybe this was what he had to look forward to when his daughter was a teenager. Surly fits of mood. David wasn’t excited for that stage of child development, but he knew it would happen. Maybe he would be away on a trip while it happened, and his daughter’s mother could deal with it all. Now there was an idea that he could deal with.

\--

It was colder out here than he’d expected. Alex drew his knees closer to his body and wrapped his arms around them.

If it weren’t so cloudy, this would be a good night to look at the stars. Not that it was really night – it would be a good afternoon near the South Pole to look at the stars if it weren’t so cloudy.

The door a few meters from him opened. Alex’s fingers dug into his arms.

“You alright?” David half shouted over the wind.

Alex glanced over to see David’s dark silhouette closing the door behind him. The silhouette moved closer to Alex until its features were finally recognizable, and the man leaned against the wall then slid down until he too was on the ground.

“All good?” David asked again. He seemed almost taken aback at seeing Alex, as if this wasn’t what he expected. Did he think Alex was going to be a crying mess? He’d just wanted personal space away from everyone else, but apparently that wasn’t going to quite happen.

“I brought your jacket. My boss, your - , well, my boss thought you’d be cold.” A dark windbreaker was pressed against Alex’s side, and Alex took the jacket and tugged it on.

“It is cold out here, yeah?” David said loudly. “It’s colder than usual. I think it’s storm weather gathering.”

Another fun moment to look forward to.

“Come inside and I’ll make you some tea. Everything will be alright, you’ll see.”

David let the wind fill the quiet between them for a few minutes, and then he continued. “It really is alright, whatever’s going on. Do you want to talk about it?”

“It might be a storm gathering. I’ll ask the others,” David said again after a long time had passed with no talking. “I’ll have to tell you, Alex, it’s cold out here. I’m going to go make some tea, but you come inside, and I’ll press a warm mug in your hands. Sound good?”

David didn’t wait that long for a response this time before he left.

It was cold, but Alex was in no rush to head inside. The jacket helped.

At one point the blondish-brownish haired man left the bridge to head back inside the main body of the yacht after Kofi headed up to the bridge, presumably to take his turn steering. Neither man paid any attention to Alex.

More time must have passed than Alex realized, because soon David was opening the door and calling dinner. When Alex didn’t respond, David disappeared, but only for a minute. And then he was back with reinforcements.

“We have warm food inside,” David suggested.

Alex looked past him at Yassen. “Alex, get up,” Yassen said, walking forward and offering him a hand. Alex took it and was hauled to his feet.

David opened the door and Alex led the way into the kitchen.

Blondish-brownish haired man was eating some dish Alex didn’t recognize. He was watching Alex as if he was tonight’s entertainment.

“It’s good that you’re inside now,” David said. He pressed a hand to Alex’s forehead. “I was getting worried.”

“I wasn’t trying to get sick,” Alex said.

“No, I wasn’t worried about you _trying_ to get sick,” David said. “But it’s not good for you, when yesterday morning you were losing a lot of blood.”

“He wasn’t going to catch hypothermia,” Yassen said, taking a seat at the table. If Alex could read any emotion in the man’s face, it was mild annoyance. “It was barely below ten degrees with wind chill.”

David seemed as if he wanted to say more, but he didn’t.

“You’re a problem child, are you?” the blondish-brownish haired man asked.

“So they tell me,” Alex said.

“Sit down and eat something,” Yassen returned.

There was a plate in front of the second chair. Alex took a seat.

David went to heat up a pot of coffee. “Alex, I don’t know if you drink coffee at night, but I’m sure a couple people on board will drink some right now.”

“Maybe,” Alex said, starting to dig into some food.

“See?” David said from across the room. “Not everything is so awful. We’ll get you home to your family in no time. Don’t worry about the small things.”

Alex wasn’t worried about the small things – he was worried about whatever was on this boat that Yassen didn’t want him to know about, and what Jack was hearing at home right now.

“I just wanted to call home,” Alex said, after thinking for a moment on Yassen’s words. _Don’t ask again –_ telling David his intentions wasn’t asking.

“Don’t worry about it,” David dismissed. “You’ll be home soon enough, safe and sound.”

“Does my family know that?” Alex asked.

No one responded to that.

In the corner of his eye he saw Yassen leave the room.

Alex finished his dinner and helped David load the dishwasher and clean the pots that had been used to cook dinner. After that David led him to the couch and they sat down for more episodes of Friends (although by this point, Alex was sick to death of every single character, their antics, and the laugh track).

“Not feeling this?” David asked after a while.

Alex shook his head.

“It’s the only series I have in English, but I might have a couple movies with English subtitles.”

“That’s fine. Watch whatever you want,” Alex said.

“I can find the options later,” David replied.

Of course – right now, David was babysitting Alex. The man couldn’t just leave the room. “It’s fine, whatever you want.”

“Alex.”

Alex looked towards the entrance to the hall. Yassen was standing there, and he waved him over.

“Be right back,” Alex said to David.

Yassen led him outside without pausing to have Alex put on shoes or the jacket – if Alex hadn’t done the same thing earlier, he might have complained. Yassen led Alex to the bridge.

“Wait outside,” Yassen told Kofi, inside the bridge.

Alex stood against the wall. Yassen stood next to the captain’s chair, inspected the devices in front of him at a glance, and then turned around.

“We should be close enough to the shore for service,” Yassen said. “You have 30 seconds on speaker once your housekeeper picks up.”

“Ok,” Alex agreed, as fast as he could before Yassen changed his mind.

Yassen pulled a cheap looking flip phone out of his pocket and handed it over. “Don’t forget the dialing code at the front of the number.”

Alex dialed in the international code for England, then Jack’s number, and then pressed speaker while hoping she would pick up.

After two rings, she did. “Hello?” Jack asked.

“Jack, it’s me!”

“Alex!” Jack sounded surprised, but not overly so. She hadn’t been told he was dead yet. Alex felt relief in his stomach. “Where are you?”

Yassen gave him a look in warning.

“Somewhere South,” Alex said, hoping that the vague direction was approved. “Listen, something happened. I’m fine, but someone might tell you I’ve been lost or killed. Don’t worry, I haven’t been.”

“What? Who’s going to tell me that? Is it them?”

“Probably, but they’ll be wrong. I promise, I’m fine.”

“Are you with someone?”

Yassen held out his hand for the phone, expectantly.

Alex should have handed it over. But, as per usual, his tongue ran away from his head.

“Mrs. Jones told me he died!”

And then Yassen yanked the phone out of his hand with one hand, flipping the phone closed, while shoving him back against the wall with the other, none too gently.

Alex flinched and raised his hands in front of his face, preparing for the blow he knew was coming. Yassen’s left hand was still holding him in place against the wall. The man’s grip didn’t loosen. When time passed and all that had happened was Alex feeling an uncomfortable tug on his stitches from the sudden movement of his arms, Alex lowered his hands slowly. Yassen would hit Alex if the man really wanted to.

Yassen didn’t hit him.

Alex met the man’s scornful gaze.

“Is there perhaps some reason you think I was not going to let you make that call?” Yassen asked.

“I was going to tell MI6 I knew you were alive eventually.”

Yassen stared at Alex a moment longer, and then released him.

“Yes, I imagine you were,” he agreed.

“You chose to help me,” Alex defended himself. “You know who I’ve been working for.”

“I know who has been using you for their own advantage, yes.”

If that was Yassen’s view on the situation, it was…remarkably closer to Alex’s own view on MI6 than Alex had realized.

Alex shrugged, helplessly.

“All I said was I’m in the South with someone who they’d told me had died. They tell me a lot of people are dead.”

Of course, most of those people Alex had seen die, but he’d thought he’d seen Yassen die too. And he had to admit, there were a lot of people he’d like to stay dead more than Yassen. Never mind that Yassen was hardly the picture of innocence – Ian Rider came to mind – at least Yassen wasn’t actively trying to kill Alex.

“How many people do you think MI6 makes deals with to keep out of your life?”

“What?” Alex asked. “You made a deal with MI6? About me?”

“It was about passing information on SCORPIA, primarily.”

No wonder Yassen wasn’t concerned with Alex having betrayed his old organization – Yassen had sold them out to an intelligence agency as well!

“And they just let you go free?” Alex asked, alarmed. _MI6 let the man who had killed at least one of their agents just leave? What about the future crimes he would commit? What about Ian?_

“No. My deal with MI6 came after I had left their custody.”

“Then what, you escaped?”

Yassen shook his head, once, but Alex suspected that it wasn’t necessarily an answer to his question so much as an instruction to drop the topic.

There was a knock on the door to the bridge. Yassen opened it to Kofi. The man said something to Yassen – Alex caught the word for storm in Spanish. Yassen nodded. “I’ll deal with it,” he said in English. “Take him downstairs and find someone to watch him.”

Alex moved to follow the man from East Africa before Yassen called for his attention again. “And Alex? Realize that you’re out of favors, with that stunt.”

\--

The oncoming storm had developed quicker than the weather had predicted. They had planned to make more progress North tonight, but it would be safer to pull into a dock along the way rather than face the storm.

Yassen was directing the ship towards a safe harbor when his phone rang for the first time.

No one had this number; it was an almost as-of-yet unused, untraceable saved for urgent matters. The only call made on this phone recently was to Alex’s housekeeper. Considering the abrupt end to the call, Yassen wouldn’t be surprised if the housekeeper was just calling back after taking her time being briefed by MI6.

Yassen ignored the first call. And the second.

The third time the phone began to ring, Yassen pressed the answer button and held the phone to his ear wordlessly.

“Is this Alex?” an unpleasantly familiar voice asked. “Or Gregorovich?’”

“Jones.”

“Gregorovich, then.” Jones stopped. Yassen didn’t fill the silence. Jones cleared her throat. “We had a deal.”

Which was more important to Jones – that Yassen left Alex alone, or that her agent was alive?

“We did.”

“And your reason for breaking our deal?”

“Saving your little spy’s life.” Again.

There was a small sound Yassen recognized as Jones sucking on a mint. She had practiced that habit often enough in the interrogation chamber. Again, Yassen waited. The phone he was on employed technology that blocked it from being tracked; the length of this call didn’t matter.

“Speaking of Alex, I’m gathering he _is_ still alive? He was when he called half an hour ago.”

If Jones expected to leave this call with anything useful, she would be mistaken. Yassen was seconds away from hanging up and turning the phone off.

The Director of Special Operations must have realized. She cleared her throat. “I’m not sure you realize the precarious position Alex is in currently.”

“Is there a point to this call beyond confirming that your agent is alive?”

“Yes. I’ll cut to the chase.”

“Do.”

Jones sighed. “Do you have any way to convince me that Alex didn’t turn traitor on his country, sell secrets to terrorists, and double cross MI6?”


	4. Stormy Seas

“Do I need a way to convince you of that?” Yassen asked, perhaps later than he should have spoken.

“Proof would be helpful. Especially after another of my agents returned home saying he’d been sold out, and his partner had disappeared shortly before my agent was attacked in a port in Argentina. We have no idea where Alex is now, but according to my older agent, if Alex is alive it’s because he double crossed MI6. This would make him a traitor to his country.”

“Does Britain have a lot of 15-year-old traitors?”

“He has left MI6 for a terrorist organization once before.”

For less than two months, from all Yassen knew. And immediately after Alex had turned around and helped MI6 destroy that same organization so completely that SCORPIA was now the laughingstock of the intelligence world, even if most involved had no knowledge of how young the agent was that had caused SCORPIA’s downfall.

Jones knew that. She knew too that the only reason Alex had run to SCORPIA was on Yassen’s advice.

“If I send Alex home now, how will he be greeted?” Yassen asked.

“I protect my agents, of course. And right now, the facts are not conclusive. I’m not going to throw him into prison with no positive proof either way.”

“Meaning?” Yassen barely restrained himself from snapping.

“Well, it’s complicated. But my best course of action would be to place him under guard. Possibly a supervised mission in a low risk situation could arranged while his name was cleared.”

“Or he could go to school.”

Jones sighed, at the other end. “I’m afraid it would be impossible to post a permanent incognito supervision force around Alex, based on what I have seen the previous times Alex has given agents around him the slip.”

Of course the boy had given them the slip. And it worked out to a convenient excuse. After the next mission it would be to another, under another pretense to keep Alex working with MI6, and in the end – assuming Alex survived – he’d be too out of sorts with the world to adjust to civilian life again. Assuming that hadn’t already happened.

“Would Ian Rider approve of this?”

Forget John and Helen Rider’s obvious disapproval – they had been dead for almost as long as Alex had been alive, and they hadn’t raised the boy. Ian Rider was the one possibly to blame.

“Perhaps you’re not the best one to ask this question.”

No, perhaps not. Yet Yassen would like to know the answer all the same. If Ian Rider had raised John’s son with care, which all accounts seemed to suggest, the man couldn’t have imaged his death would force his teenage nephew into the line of fire on not just one occasion but several.

If Ian Rider had suggested the idea to MI6 – if he had even imagined bringing Alex into MI6’s grasp within the year before his death – then it was a mercy to Alex that his uncle was dead.

“Ian Rider wanted you to send his nephew to Cornwall?”

There was a hesitation – not long, but enough. No. Ian Rider might have been a fool who seemed to enjoy the job of being a spy, but he wasn’t heartless. He hadn’t raised Alex to die a teenager.

“I imagine Ian always knew Alex might be a target.”

And yet Alex hadn’t been. Not until the remaining adult Rider’s death.

There was no point wasting this time talking about what shouldn’t have been any longer. There was a point to this call, as Jones herself had confirmed. “What do you want?”

“I want to clear Alex’s name.”

“Look at the lives he’s saved.”

“My superiors want proof. Proof that they’re being lied to by my agent, and that Alex hasn’t turned traitor once again.”

“And you think I’ll provide the proof? That I would want to, even if I kept evidence of everyone I met with?”

“No, I think you probably won’t.” Jones waited a beat. “Which of course is fine. I can find evidence one way or another myself, quite possibly with Alex’s help. However, there was the possibility, and I thought I would look for the simplest solution to this problem.”

Yassen glared at the sea in front of him. Coldly, he answered the unasked question. “You’re wasting your time after all. How you handle your child spy is none of my business.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Jones replied. “In that case, when can I expect Alex back in England?”

\--

It was hard to tell if it was the crash of thunder that woke Alex, or the rolling of the boat from the storm that must have caught up to them.

The Jackie Chan lookalike was asleep at the end of the couch, head lolled back against the wall.

Alex stood up as quietly as he could.

Theoretically, he had everything going for him. There was loud rain pounding on the sides of the boat, and waves crashing outside. He had socks on. _Theoretically,_ he wouldn’t wake anyone.

Admittedly, the boat’s unsteady swaying wasn’t quite in his favor. If someone was already awake there was no need to wake them.

Jackie Chan didn’t wake up when Alex got to the hallway, and no one else seemed to be about. At least not anyone that Alex could hear over the rain.

Alex descended the stairs slowly, trying to disguise his footsteps as just more rain. It was only when he got to the bottom of the stairs that he realized his mistake. There was a light on under two of the doors down here – now was probably not the time to run around looking for whatever goods were stashed on the boat. One wrong noise and someone would hear. Possibly.

“Hello?” Alex called in a whisper. “Anyone awake?”

Alex had been on boats before, enough to have some semblance of sea legs. It was a good thing, he thought, as the boat seemed to lurch under him. Even with his sea legs Alex stumbled to the side until he caught himself against the wall.

His arm didn’t complain from the action as much as it might have a day ago.

The door closest to the stairs might not have opened soundlessly, but the rain certainly drowned it out. Alex wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been looking right at it.

“Hi,” Alex said quietly. “We’re not right in the storm, are we?”

“We’re docked.”

They were docked? Alex looked towards the porthole window – outside was pitch black. He couldn’t see anything, but it didn’t mean Yassen was lying.

Alex could probably have struck out on his own just now, and no one would have been the wiser until someone went looking for him.

It was never easy to read Yassen, but Alex suspected the man had made the same realization.

Yassen nodded at the stairs and Alex led the way back to top floor of the main boat. “Stay there,” Yassen said, leaving Alex in the hall by himself as he entered the room Alex had been sleeping in.

Nothing could be heard over the din of the storm, but the conversation that must be happening inside didn’t last long. Then Yassen appeared to wave Alex into the room.

Inside, Jackie Chan glowered at Alex.

“Go back to sleep.” Yassen said, not looking at Alex. His gaze was fixed on Jackie Chan. Alex couldn’t think of what the assassin’s expression reminded him of, but he was glad enough that the stare wasn’t at him. “This mistake won’t happen again.”

There was another crash of thunder outside. It sounded close. Alex flinched.

Despite what Yassen had instructed, he wasn’t going back to sleep tonight.

“Sit down,” the man snarled at Alex as soon as Yassen had left.

Alex curled into a sitting position and pulled the blankets around himself.

This was going to be a long night.

\--

The night was longer than Alex anticipated. Maybe it was because by morning, the rainclouds outside still obscured the sky, leaving the day almost as gloomy as the night. The persistent rain outside didn’t help Alex’s slight headache. At least the choppy waters had calmed a little, and the thunder had subsided, allowing Alex at least the pretense of rest.

It was clear from the moment David entered the room that he looked exactly as worn as Alex felt. When he noticed Alex’s attention, the man smiled wearily but said nothing else.

Jackie Chan left the room without a backwards glare.

“I found a film with English subtitles,” David said, holding up a thin, clear plastic DVD holder. “You know ¡Ay Carmela!?”

“No.”

“It’s a good film. You can watch it later.”

“How long is the storm going to last?” Alex asked. “And did you expect it? Is it going to make your trip longer?”

Hopefully, they had built ‘storm time’ into the trip. A longer trip meant longer before Alex would be home (and longer for Alex’s impulsive behavior to land him in trouble).

“Eh, it’s not a concern. You should relax, enjoy the trip.”

Sure. This was definitely the vacation Alex had hoped for during his break.

“I’ll make you breakfast,” David offered. “Come on.”

Alex wasn’t looking forward to facing everyone that had passed in the hall to the kitchen, but he wasn’t going to force David to stay in here with him either.

Yassen and the man Alex didn’t yet have a name for were eating breakfast, apparently in their own worlds. Yassen had headphones in – the kind that didn’t block external noise much, Alex noticed. Blondish-brownish haired man was reading a thick novel in Spanish authored by Borges.

If they were in dock, were they about to leave? Alex had sworn he’d seen the man from East Africa pass by in the direction of the kitchen earlier.

“What do you want to eat?” David asked.

“What do you have?”

“We’re well stocked.”

“Toast and jam?”

David opened the fridge and peeked inside. “We have Strawberry jam?”

“That’s fine.”

There was a loud slam outside. Alex turned to the doorway in time to see Kofi walk inside. The man’s head and jacket were plastered with rain. Kofi caught Alex’s eye. “You need something?”

“No.”

“Well, tell me when you need a smoke and I can help you there. I wouldn’t recommend it though. It’s pissing rain out there.”

Kofi grabbed a mug and filled with coffee from a nearly full pot, before stomping out of the kitchen.

“Alex, your toast is almost ready,” David said. Alex went to pull his toast out of the toaster and slather the bread with butter and jam.

The man reading Borges slid over without looking up so Alex could sit at the bench if he wanted. Alex grabbed a seat.

“Did you sleep?”

“No,” Alex answered David’s question as the man grabbed the remaining seat at the table. Alex hadn’t managed to sleep through any storms with thunder in the past few months. And one time he hadn’t managed to function through a storm – Mrs. Pleasure had been the only one around that day though, and from what he knew she’d never said a word of it to anyone else.

“No, I thought not. I thought I heard you at one point in the night, outside my room. Probably imagined it though.”

“I was down there,” Alex said, grateful again that he’d thought to test if anyone was listening in last night before trying anything.

“It was a mistake,” Yassen said, his headphones still in. “It won’t happen again.”

Sometime in the night, Alex had figured out where the blank look had seemed familiar the night before – it was the same expression on Yassen’s face that night in Cornwall, when he’d killed a man who had dropped one of the vials of the virus. Perhaps it was for everyone’s good last night that Alex hadn’t managed to get into anything.

Although if someone on board was killed because Alex managed to get into something he wasn’t supposed to be in, Alex couldn’t claim to be upset.

Maybe David was the exception. The man at least pretended to care about people.

“I’m going to stop in the town today,” Yassen said. “Are you going to watch him?”

“Sure. Don’t imagine there will be many problems; Alex’s amiable enough.”

“There won’t be problems,” Alex agreed.

Alex got the feeling Yassen didn’t quite believe him.

“We’re watching a movie. Something in Spanish. Right?” Alex looked to David for confirmation.

“Yes.”

“That’s pleasant. Would you like to hear the alternative, little Alex, should you get into trouble?”

Alex was tired. He’d barely slept the night before.

Was it too teenage to say he was too tired for this shit? He expected the villains to make threats, but Yassen was threatening enough without explicit threats.

“Not really. I’m not going to do anything.”

And he wasn’t. It was sheer stupidity to try to sneak around on this yacht when at least three people besides Yassen were awake and not occupied with anything while the ship was docked.

When that was the end of the conversation, Alex assumed he’d been believed. Good. This trip was unpleasant enough without general fears about specific tortures to keep him awake at night as well.

“Come on,” David urged as soon as Alex had cleared his plate away. “We’ll watch the movie. I think you’ll enjoy it.”

\--

After napping through the movie and the first hour or two of sailing that day, and then taking a shower and getting to wear the clean clothes Yassen had grabbed for him in town, Alex had to admit he didn’t feel bad. His arm would probably be somewhat sore for a few days, according to David - but overall, he’d felt worse. He’d been in worse prisons. He’d been treated worse by the people holding him captive. And now that the storm had cleared enough to allow for smooth sailing and they’d gotten into calmer waters and the view from the deck was almost peaceful, he could say that he’d probably seen worse sights. Well – considering all the people he’d witnessed be brutally murdered, he’d _definitely_ seen worse sighs.

Alex inhaled deeply. Despite all the wind tangling his wet hair, it felt nice to just sit outside in the sun. The smell of the ocean air reminded him of better times – of sailing with Ian off the coast of France when he was young.

Whatever was being smuggled on this ship couldn’t be reached from the deck, Alex assumed. He couldn’t imagine Yassen would let him sit without supervision in a location that opened to the hidden contents of the ship.

Alex didn’t really care. Later he would worry about the illicit business clearly happening on the ship. Not now. He didn’t always have to be the reluctant spy.

For now, it was enough to just sit still and know that he was alright.

\--

Growing up, Yassen had been called ‘single-minded’ by many of his teachers. The adults around him when he was a teenager would have called him focused. And over his adult years, Yassen had learned to push away thoughts of imminent danger when it was not helpful to concentrate on them.

It shouldn’t be so difficult to conjugate the verbs in these sentences. The characters for certain words shouldn’t slip away from him as he went to write them down.

It had been years since Yassen’s attention had been so shot. And yet one conversation with Jones, a woman he despised, and his attention had been divided between what was happening around him and the fact that MI6 was attempting to coerce either Alex or Yassen to do their own investigations for them.

Relations between MI6 and the child must be strained if coercion was necessary to get him to agree to their terms. How often had Alex been pushed into missions in the past? Clearly, as Yassen had seen with Cray, Alex had a habit of getting himself into trouble without MI6’s involvement. Yet that had only occurred after MI6 had already begun interfering in Alex’s life.

Had Alex been in Cornwall because he’d joined MI6 to avenge his uncle, or had more been at play?

It didn’t truly matter. At this point Alex had been involved with MI6 for well over a year. He’d been involved with other intelligence services as well, according to what Yassen had heard. And the moment the shipment that had been handed off to Yassen’s crew had been disguised in one of those boarding ships for teenagers, Alex would have been the logical candidate for the job.

The situation was unfortunate.

The situation was also not Yassen’s problem.

Jones seemed to think it was. Her proposition at the end of the call had assumed Yassen had some lingering attachment to Alex’s survival that would cause Yassen to endanger his current assignment for the boy’s sake. And while the first part of that sentiment was true – Yassen would admit he had no desire to see John’s son dead – the second part didn’t follow.

If it wouldn’t cause half of MI6’s active agents to descend upon him, Yassen could just not send Alex back. The boy could be put to work. He was smart enough to survive Yassen’s world, almost certainly. Fate was on the boy’s side.

Alex wouldn’t agree to work for Yassen if his life depended on it. And his life might depend on it.

Somehow Ian Rider had impressed a set of incredibly inconvenient morals upon the boy in the 14 years they’d had together. Perhaps if the man had known what would happen following his death, Alex would have been taught more about surviving on his own instead of why people mattered. In general, people didn’t matter. It would do Alex no good to continue to believe that his life was worth less than others.

How would Alex react to this newest coercion?

It shouldn’t matter. Let the boy figure out his own life. Yassen could offer some guidance if asked; considering their history, he thought it unlikely he would be.

But perhaps there was a way he could offer assistance that Alex would take. Probably the boy wouldn’t. At least Yassen would have offered, though. And the voice in the back of his head that sounded suspiciously like an old mentor would have reason to stop nagging him.

He would offer. Alex would refuse.

Hunter could finally stop insisting that Yassen interfere.

\--

If Alex had ever been bitten by a radioactive spider, he would have said his spider sense was going off.

David had just retrieved him to re-watch the movie Alex had slept through earlier when blondish-brownish haired man told Alex he was wanted on the bridge.

Yassen didn’t so much as greet him when Alex entered the bridge. In fact, Yassen didn’t pay him any mind at all, other than one tilt of his head in the direction of a seat.

Alex took a seat. Something was wrong.

He hadn’t gotten into anything. At least, not today. And all he’d done yesterday was borrow David’s phone and tell Jack that he was with someone who was supposed to be dead.

So, two things might be more than Yassen would have let anyone else get away with in the same position, but Yassen had seemed fine earlier. And Alex hadn’t even had a chance to make a call with David’s phone!

“I received an interesting call last night,” Yassen said after a while.

Had Jack called back?

“My housekeeper?” Alex asked. “She doesn’t even know who you are. Not really. I’ve barely told her anything related to MI6 – not even all of what happened in France.”

Yassen said nothing.

“She might have said her name was Jack,” Alex offered.

“No. Not your housekeeper.”

“Was your number unlisted?” If it had been, there would be no way for MI6 to know what number to call back.

“It was intended to be. Apparently not.”

Then it was MI6.

Something was wrong.

“Jones is offering you a way to clear your name, after an attempt to frame you for double crossing MI6.”

Alex stared. What?

“I didn’t double cross anyone.”

“Another agent is telling them differently.”

Mattley! It had to be. He hadn’t been content to seemingly leave Alex to die, but he had to make sure Alex’s reputation died with him.

“I need to call Mrs. Jones. Please. I know you said I’m out of favors, but if she thinks I’m running around with you trying to get around the government –” Alex stopped when Yassen held up a hand.

“Jones doesn’t think you’ve left MI6.”

“But you just said,” Alex started to say. And then he understood.

Mrs. Jones didn’t think Alex had betrayed MI6. But someone had accused Alex of the crime, and Mrs. Jones would use it to her advantage.

“What does she want from me?” Alex asked.

“I think you know already.”

He did. Another mission. There was always another one.

Alex had believed her when she’d promised the next missions would be a choice. Twice fooled, twice the fool. Alex had thought the peace earlier was the calm after the storm, but he should have known. There wasn’t a calm after the storm anymore – only entering the eye of the storm, having a moment of calm, and then venturing back into the rest of the chaos.

MI6 was never going to let Alex have a normal life.


	5. The Offer

“They’re never going to let me go, are they?” the boy asked, unreadable.

No, Yassen knew. They wouldn’t.

“You have proven invaluable to them more than a few times already.” Jones would be a fool to let Alex go when she had him so neatly ensnared in her world. It wasn’t in MI6’s best interests to let him go – anyone could see that. “The first time you agreed, I suspect they realized how much power they had over you. It would have been better if you had never worked with them.” At this point, Yassen suspected, it was too late for MI6 to choose to separate from Alex without considerable incentive.

“What else could I have done? Gone into foster care? After that, someone was usually threatening me, and if I wasn’t on their mission someone could kill me. I already was lucky once – I don’t think the next bullet will miss.”

Foster care, compared to working for a ruthless intelligence service, seemed an excellent idea. It was also clear Alex wouldn’t agree with that assessment.

“What are you going to do?” Yassen asked.

“It doesn’t sound like I have a choice. I’ll help Mrs. Jones clear my name and hope I get to have Christmas at home. She isn’t giving me a lot of options.”

“Not without significant expense on my part,” Yassen agreed.

“What do you mean?”

Yassen had been considering how to word Jones’ proposition for most of last night, as well as how to word his own version of the offer. Best to keep it simple. Alex would refuse either way, Yassen suspected.

“She offered another choice.”

Alex wasn’t a fool. And perhaps a similar offer had been made to others on Alex’s behalf before, because the boy worked it out immediately. “If you help MI6 with something, they’ll clear my name.” Alex laughed, sharply. “They like to do that. Offer an impossible choice next to a terrible one until there’s only one path I can take.”

“Which was the impossible task?”

“I’m out of favors with you, remember?” Alex said.

“You are. If I help, it isn’t going to be a favor.”

Alex’s eyes flashed. “I’m not helping you smuggle anything.”

Yassen almost smiled. “No, you aren’t.” He wouldn’t trust Alex to assist in illicit activities in the most minor of circumstances, let alone when considering the importance of the parts on this ship now. “If you would like my help, you are going to pay me.”

Alex frowned. “What?”

“I work for money, little one. I can help you, provided you pay. Or I can drop you off somewhere your handlers can retrieve you.”

“I’m not helping make you rich!”

Yassen shrugged. That was Alex’s choice to make. “You have day and a half to make your choice. I will want an answer by the time we dock tomorrow evening.” It would be easier for Yassen to proceed with what MI6 wanted if he knew to look for the information by the time that he was picking up the next shipment in the Brazilian port. If Alex changed his mind after that, perhaps something could be arranged.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m not agreeing.” Alex glared, as if expecting Yassen to object. When Yassen didn’t, the boy glanced down, took a breath, and then looked back up with a blank expression. “Can I go now?”

“Go back to where you were before this. I don’t want you hear you wandered off.”

Alex left.

The conversation had gone as well as Yassen had expected. Alex’s refusal had been predictable.

Yassen had offered. It was no fault of Yassen’s if Alex preferred to try his own methods to free himself from MI6’s web.

\--

It would be nice to claim the situation was unbelievable. In truth, the whole affair was so unsurprising Alex could only blame himself for not expecting it. Mrs. Jones had offered him a choice on one mission, and when it had gone south, she’d taken immediate advantage. Why had Alex not seen it coming?

At least Mrs. Jones could claim – weak though the excuse wore – that she employed these tactics to help people. Yassen could hardly claim that excuse. Alex was being blackmailed into endangering his life for ‘the greater good’ and Yassen thought he could use that to his own advantage!

The din of the laugh track to Friends raged on in the background, with David laughing along with the audience. Alex tried to tune it out. After they’d watched the Spanish movie, David had switched back to an episode of Friends that Alex had seen earlier. Admittedly, it would be generous to say Alex had ‘watched’ the Spanish movie, distressed as his thoughts were from the conversation with Yassen. Alex wasn’t sure he recalled a single detail from the film, up to and including its title.

MI6 was never going to let him go. It didn’t even matter if Alex was able to pay Yassen to help him, because as soon as Yassen freed Alex from these obligations, Mrs. Jones would be back with another recruitment excuse! And how did Yassen think Alex was going to pay him? Alex was 15. Other than almost selling his house when he’d been living with the Pleasures for a while, Alex didn’t handle his finances. He wasn’t sure he knew how to make a bank transfer even assuming MI6 wasn’t watching.

Although – no.

Alex shoved away thoughts of the reward Jack had recently been given. Not that. Jack would probably be willing to spend a significant sum to help Alex, but that wasn’t the problem. It wasn’t going to help! It would be only a waste of her money – and worse, it would fund an assassin. The man who had murdered Ian.

Every choice led to MI6. Only at least one choice would give Alex more time to figure things out on his own, not on a mission.

“Where’s your boss?” Alex asked David, abruptly. “Is he still in the bridge?”

David paused the show. “I don’t believe so. Do you need something?”

Alex stood up and walked to the kitchen. No one was there. Alex turned toward the other end of the hall and headed to the stairs.

“Alex!” David said from the door to the hall. “You can’t go down there. Come back here, we can figure it out.”

Downstairs, Alex knocked on the door to the room Yassen had emerged from last night. Loudly. When he wasn’t immediately answered, he knocked again, louder.

David hurried down the steps. “Alex!”

Unhurriedly, Yassen opened the door. “Yes?” he inquired.

“I need to talk to you.”

“He didn’t tell me he was going to do this,” David said from behind Alex. “I’ll get him out of the way.”

“I’ll deal with him,” Yassen said.

“It won’t happen again.”

“You can go now.” Yassen waited until David was gone to stand out of the doorway, allowing Alex in. He closed the door behind him.

For what Alex had to assume was the largest room, based on the door configuration in the hallway, and for a room in such an elaborate yacht, the room was sparse. A large, well-made bed took up a third of the room, with a nightstand, dresser, desk, and chair also taking up space.

There were no signs of a personality in the room. No bags laying out, no mess to be seen. Whatever was in the room had to have been put away neatly in the dresser and nightstand.

Alex’s eyes fell onto the desk. Disassembled guns – a rifle and two handguns – were laid out across the surface. Yassen must have been cleaning them when Alex had entered.

“Did you need something?” Yassen asked, taking his seat at the desk.

Alex took a deep breath. He almost hated himself for this.

“What if I want to hire you?” he asked, voice steady.

“Do you?”

“I don’t know.”

Yassen only looked at him.

“Look, how much money do you think I have?” Alex asked.

“Do _you_ know how much money you have, is perhaps the better question. I assume some has been left to you, and perhaps MI6 has paid you for some of your work.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been paid.” Alex ignored the comment about money being left to him. It was better if they didn’t talk about Ian. Nothing good would come from it.

“So perhaps my offer doesn’t apply.”

Jack would never agree to this.

Alex could ask her not to ask questions.

“I can access money.”

“Alright,” Yassen said.

“What did MI6 ask you to do?”

Yassen turned to his desk and began to reassemble the rifle. Alex averted his eyes. He didn’t want to think about any of this.

“They asked me to find the agent who blamed you, and prove that he is the traitor in their ranks.”

“That’s all?” Alex asked, feeling a wash of relief. That wasn’t what he had expected, he had to admit. Although what he expected, he wasn’t quite sure.

“That’s all.”

“And then, what, kill him?”

“That would be up to you if you are paying me. I can kill someone if you would like.”

“No!” Alex said, before recovering himself. “I don’t want anyone to die.”

“That can be arranged,” Yassen said. If he thought Alex was wrong to not want revenge on Mattley, the Russian wisely kept it to himself.

“I pay you, and you find proof that I was framed, and then you give it MI6,” Alex clarified.

“Yes.”

“What if they decide to force me on another mission anyway?”

Back to Alex, Yassen shrugged. “I’m offering help for this situation now. I’m not your babysitter. You will figure out future situations the same way you have always managed them before.”

Reassuring.

“How will I pay you? MI6 keeps an eye on everything I do.” And perhaps more pertinent – how much did Yassen want?

Yassen picked up on the unspoken question. “We should discuss my rate first.”

“Alright. But I haven’t decided that I’m going to do this.”

“It would cost a significant amount for an intelligence agent from a nation as large as the United Kingdom to be assassinated,” Yassen continued. “It is common to discuss rates in American dollars, and I would estimate perhaps $75,000 for a hit on the man who framed you. However, you do not want him dead, so I will offer you a deal.”

“How gracious,” Alex said, dryly.

“I would estimate $50,000 to be fair.”

Alex couldn’t claim to know much about the prices in the criminal world, but he had thought it would be more.

“Where is this money coming from?” Yassen asked. “A bank account in England?”

“In America, I think.” Jack never discussed money with Alex. Still, he thought he recalled hearing Jack discuss her financials with Ian in the past.

“Is the account under your name?”

“No.” Alex looked back on the desk. All three of the guns were now assembled and laid out in a neat row.

“Who will you need to contact to transfer the money?”

“My housekeeper.”

“Would this be a lot of money for her to spend?”

“Yes, but she has quite a lot of money.” Maybe that was a mistake – it certainly wasn’t smart negotiating to reveal how much money was lying in the bank – but Yassen didn’t press the point.

“You need to decide if you are going to hire me. I will figure out the details of how to best transfer the money without MI6 knowing what is happening. If you decide my services are worth the price, you will need to figure out how I can contact your housekeeper without MI6 knowing.”

“How long can I think about it?”

“We’re picking a shipment up in a day. I will need an answer before then, but you will have longer to get the money to me.”

“Ok.”

“If we are doing this properly, I may need you to stay with my ship for longer.”

“How much longer?” Alex asked, alarmed.

“A day or two. Three or four, if conditions are not right. Not long.”

Yassen’s crew may not like having to spend longer watching Alex, but that was their problem. One to four days more at sea would hardly kill Alex – not compared to going on another mission that actually might.

“I’ll let you know,” Alex promised. He reached for the door to leave, then paused. “Don’t kill him means everyone, right? You won’t kill anyone when going after him?”

“I can do that.”

“Alright.”

As Alex headed back to David, he thought over the conversation. It was a lot to take in. Certainly, Alex had never thought that at 15 he’d be hiring an assassin to clear his name for MI6 while knowing full well that the agency didn’t really think he’d done anything wrong. And technically he hadn’t yet. He could still not. But he rather thought he knew the outcome of this situation.

Earlier, he’d told Yassen that MI6 tended to give him an impossible choice next to a terrible one, knowing full well that Alex would choose the terrible mission over the impossible choice of knowing he would be without Jack or people would be hurt without his help. But this time the choice was really an impossible choice next to an impossible choice. Leave Jack and school behind for endless missions or hire Yassen, then think of a way to get Mrs. Jones to leave him alone.

Given that choice, there was only one impossible choice to choose.

\--

Alex waited almost a full day before he told Yassen his choice. Between their conversation and that time, he managed to keep busy in a surprising series of ways.

The blondish-brownish haired man watched Alex at breakfast that day, and they managed to get into a long discussion of the different British football teams. After that, when David took up the duty of watching Alex, the blondish-brownish haired man disappeared only to reappear not long after with a Mexican football magazine.

The next two hours passed with Alex deciphering the conjugations of Spanish verbs to properly understand the articles. His Spanish teacher would be proud that Alex was practicing his language skills over break.

After lunch, Kofi, David, and blondish-brownish haired man roped Alex into a series of card games. Kofi was delighted that Alex was there, as they finally had four willing card game players awake at the same time.

For the final game, the men bet petty cash in currencies from several countries. Each man pitched in a few of their various dollars and pesos and reals to Alex. Alex immediately lost almost his entire small pile of cash to Kofi (much the delight of the East African), but it was a fun game regardless. 

The distractions of the day weren’t enough to keep Alex’s thoughts from straying to home in London or his problems with MI6. None of the men were friendly enough for him to forget that they had to be hardened criminals if they were working for or with Yassen.

But the day also wasn’t _un_ pleasant.

Once again, Alex was surrounded by criminals in a situation that few others in the world, let alone teenagers, could claim to understand. At least this time, Alex wasn’t miserable.

Sometimes you had to take what you got.

\--

They’d docked the night before, and if Alex was reading the clues correctly, this time Yassen felt less at ease with leaving Alex in a situation where he might leave. Instead of leaving Alex with another member of the crew, Yassen had kept close to Alex himself. Yassen had kept Alex in the kitchen for hours last night while the man worked on his Japanese. At least the football magazine Alex had been given was some form of entertainment. After that, Yassen had moved them to the entertainment room so Alex could fall asleep. Although Alex suspected Yassen had left someone else to watch him at night, it was impossible to prove, as Yassen was already awake and drinking coffee in the same chair as he’d been sitting in the night before when Alex woke.

It wasn’t creepy at all that a series of grown men were watching him sleep every night.

“Morning,” Alex yawned, before rolling off the couch and grabbing the bag with his new clothes in it to take to the restroom and change.

Afterwards, as Alex scarfed down the toast he’d made for breakfast and Yassen stood by the hallway, the change in the mood seemed even more clear. David and Kofi were in the kitchen as well. They were being perfectly civil, and had even switched to English (for his benefit, Alex guessed) while talking about music they enjoyed. But they weren’t sitting down, Kofi was glancing at Yassen every other minute, and David was holding a stack of paperwork that Alex hadn’t seen before. Paperwork for customs? They’d sailed long enough to possibly be in another country by now, Alex would guess.

A few rings punctuated the kitchen and then Yassen held a phone to his ear. David and Kofi fell quiet. Yassen listened for a minute, before responding with a single word, in English – “yes.” When Yassen put the phone away, David and Kofi resumed their chatter.

“Alex,” Yassen beckoned.

“One minute,” Alex said, trying to wash down his toast with his tall glass of juice.

“Now,” Yassen said. His tone wasn’t any sharper than before, but David and Kofi paused and looked at Alex. Alex put his cup down.

“Alright,” Alex said.

Yassen all but pushed Alex down the hall and down the stairs. It was the first time Alex had been technically allowed to the lower floor.

Yassen opened a door without knocking. Inside were two dressers and a bunk bed. A jumble of possessions cluttered the top of one dresser, while the other appeared bare.

There was already a rope tied around the metal frame of the bunk.

For the second time that day, Alex restrained himself from the wildly inappropriate joke.

“Sit down,” Yassen ordered. Alex sat on the edge of the bottom bed and allowed his hands to be bound to the bunk. Next to him, he noticed with trepidation, were two long black cloths.

“I don’t need those,” he objected, seconds before Yassen began to secure the first cloth around his eyes. “Don’t I get my freedom? I’m paying you!”

“Have you already paid me?”

Alex thought of a reply too late, as the second cloth was forced into his mouth and secured around the back of his head.

Seconds later the door closed, and Alex was left, blind and bound in the dark dungeon of the ship.

Time passed. Footsteps walked past the door and disappeared. More time passed. There were more footsteps. Once, far away, he heard a scraping sound.

His arm ached. He was starting to regret the glass of juice he’d had with breakfast that morning.

Alex was on his third countdown from 1,000 when the door opened. Alex held himself still. As far as he could tell, he wasn’t in danger. Struggling only meant it would take longer to be untied.

His hands were released, and Alex immediately reached for the blindfold to unblind himself. David was peering at him sympathetically. “Need help?” the man offered.

Alex turned away so David could untie the gag.

“Thanks,” Alex said through a dry mouth, realizing he needed a glass of water. “Can I run to the restroom?”

“I’ll walk you up.”

Upstairs, Kofi was standing so that his body blocked off the hallway leading to the door. He gave an upward tilt of his head to Alex. Alex returned the gesture before ducking into the restroom.

Kofi was still in the hall when Alex emerged from the restroom. “Kitchen,” Kofi directed, and Alex followed the direction.

Alex grabbed a bottle of water and took a seat across from Yassen. “Was all that necessary?” Alex asked after a big swig of water, knowing that even if he got a response, it would only confirm that the binds from before were in fact required.

“I’ve met you,” Yassen rebutted.

The blondish-brownish haired man leaning against the wall, surprised, laughed. David’s eyebrows raised. Alex scowled.

“They won’t be necessary again anytime soon, I expect,” Yassen said. “We’ll be away from shore for at least the next two days.”

“Well, let’s get a move on then,” Alex responded. The sooner he was home, the better.

“We’ll be leaving soon.”

No sooner had Yassen said the words than a loud banging began. It was coming from the direction of the door to the yacht.

Yassen shot a look at Alex as he stood. “Stay still.”

There was a small squeak as the door opened. “You need to be gone,” Kofi said, in the hallway.

“I need to speak to Gregorovich,” a man demanded.

Yassen approached the hall. “What’s the problem?”

“ _He’_ s the problem.”

A new voice spoke, pleading, in a language that sounded similar to Spanish, but wasn’t quite recognizable to Alex. Portuguese?

“Come inside,” Yassen said. He re-entered the kitchen, with two men following him. One man was trembling and pale, the other angry and holding the first man by the arm. Kofi stayed in the hall.

“ _This rat_ ,” the second man spat. “He tried to steal some of the boxes to pass off fake products.”

From the corner of his eye, Alex noticed David cast a furtive glance his way.

“Do you have proof?” Yassen asked.

“We found over a hundred boxes at his house.”

Yassen glanced at the first man, and the frightened man immediately burst into a panicked string of Portuguese. “Does he speak English?”

“No.”

“Have him sit down,” David suggested. He walked over to the frightened man and tapped him on the shoulder. “Let him go,” David told the second man. When the second man did, David helped the man sit in the seat Yassen had been in moments before. Alex looked at the first man.

The man had committed the crime he was accused of. Alex could see it immediately. The fear in the man’s eyes came from a place of knowing the consequences for crossing these men, and crossing them anyway. And now the man had been caught.

“We’d been missing labels for a month, and then boxes started to go missing as well,” the second man snarled. “He was accused, but I didn’t believe it. So I sent a man to his house, and the boxes were in the front room! He was so convinced he wouldn’t be caught that he didn’t even hide the evidence.”

“And then he came with you?” Yassen asked.

“We have his wife and son.”

Alex stiffened, back pressed against the bench.

“How old is the son?” David asked.

“Young. Younger than him,” the second man said while looking straight at Alex.

The man in the chair saw the people in the room looking at Alex and began to plead again.

“No, no, no,” David said to the man, holding him by the shoulder. He said words in slow Spanish to the man that Alex recognized as meaning ‘everyone is safe.’ Then David turned to the second man and reverted to English. “You’ll teach anyone who’s watching this a lesson if you kill them.”

Alex might be sick.

“Was there any proof that they were involved?” Yassen asked.

“Who knows what they knew?” The second man let out a vicious swear.

Yassen glanced at Alex.

_Please don’t do this._

“You have all the boxes and labels reclaimed?”

“Yes.”

Yassen shrugged. “You can kill them later if they are trouble. If they are still alive but he is not, people will remember the family torn apart by greed. And we will have more incentive when we ask him if anyone else is involved.”

The second man scowled.

David smiled reassuringly at the first man and patted his arm again.

“Call your men,” Yassen instructed. “Have them release his family. Let him hear.”

The second man made a call. The first man started to cry in the middle of the call. When the call was ended, the first man turned to David and started to speak to him rapidly. Even without knowing the language, Alex could tell the man was tripping over his words.

“We’ll find out what he knows,” David reassured the second man. “No one will find him after we’re done with him.”

“Clean up the factory. If anyone talks, solve the problem as you need. I will call you soon.”

Scowling unhappily all the while, the second man agreed that he would do as Yassen said.

“Now go. We need to leave soon, and you have this problem to deal with,” Yassen said.

“I want a video,” the second man said. “He needs to be a lesson to everyone else.”

“It will be painful,” David agreed.

Grumbling, the second man left.

David continued to sit next to the first man. Alex averted his eyes from both men, turning away. Blondish-brownish haired man, still against the wall, caught Alex looking his way and grimaced.

“Quiet, little one,” Yassen said.

Alex glared, at no one in particular. How had he been so stupid? How had he thought, for even a minute, that any of these men weren’t just as bad as the others? “I wasn’t speaking.”

After the past year, did Yassen think Alex hadn’t seen this before?


	6. Questions

“Does he have to be here?” the blondish-brownish haired man asked. He sounded, if Alex were to believe him, genuinely uncomfortable.

“I’d prefer he isn’t,” Yassen replied. “Take him downstairs. I’ll get him when we’re done.”

Alex trailed the man out of the room, slowly, casting a final look at the doomed prisoner on his way.

The two barely spoke to each other downstairs, as Alex sat in the bed he’d been tied in before and picked at his nails. “I’m sorry you were there for that,” the man said at one point, when Alex buried his head in his hands for a brief instant. “It would have been better if you had been somewhere else.”

The boat’s rocking increased as they went further out to sea. Alex tried to concentrate on the irregular movement instead of the nausea that could be attested to what he knew must be happening upstairs. Even tied up after Yassen first brought him on board the ship, he hadn’t felt this sense of foreboding.

Alex didn’t react to the knock on the door or look over when the door opened.

“That wasn’t long,” the man with blondish hair said.

“It didn’t need long.”

It had felt a long time to Alex, but there was no point mentioning that. “Is he still alive?” Alex asked, unsure of which answer he preferred.

“No.”

“Could I have done anything to stop it?” He knew the answer he’d prefer to this question.

“No.” There wasn’t any indecision in Yassen’s tone, not that Alex had expected any. And Yassen’s words were hardly meant to be reassuring, Alex imagined. But it helped.

\--

Alex flipped through the pages of the Spanish football magazine he’d been given, trying to concentrate on the content inside. At the least, he could avoid looking at the man he never wanted to talk to again.

Yassen had left the room only five minutes ago. David had only been appointed Alex’s ‘babysitter’ five minutes ago. Already Alex wanted to leave.

Yassen probably hadn’t even had a good reason to leave. What could he do to be productive on a yacht on the ocean, with no internet access? As much as Alex had a complicated relationship with Yassen, at least he knew what Yassen did for a living. There had never been some false pretense of niceties between the two of them.

The worst part was Yassen had _known_ how Alex felt. There was no other explanation for his warning look before he’d left, along with his words: _Don’t cause trouble._

Out of everyone on the ship, couldn’t Alex have stayed with anyone else? A criminal who _didn’t_ pretend kindness while plotting to kill children?

“Would you like me to find you something else to read?” David asked, from beside Alex.

Alex ignored him.

“Or do you want a snack?” the man offered.

A hole would have been burned straight through the middle of the magazine if glares had any effect on paper.

“Do you like chips?”

“Leave me alone.”

Miraculously, David did. For a few minutes. And then he spoke again.

“Are you tired of Friends yet? I think we’re halfway through the season on the episodes we’ve seen together.”

Ignoring David hadn’t worked, so Alex attempted the straight-forward approach. “I’m not watching anything else with you.”

“Tired of movies?” David asked curiously.

Rude words tumbled through Alex’s mind. Then, almost before he’d realized it, they’d tumbled out of his mouth as well.

David only laughed. “I’d say you’re grounded,” the man joked, “but I think you already are.”

Alex turned his furious glare from the magazine to the man the glare was meant for. “Leave me _alone_.”

The man held up his hands, conciliatorily. “I’m responsible for watching you. I’m only making sure you’re feeling well. If you want me to let you be, I will. I know teenage mood swings are a terrible thing.”

“No, being stuck with a bunch of killers and thugs is a terrible thing,” Alex replied.

The smile on David’s face turned in a placating grimace. “I’m not sure we’re as bad as all that.”

Alex stared, momentarily stunned out of his fury. “As bad as all what? Who do you think you’re better than? You’re a killer. You just killed someone. And you would have had more people killed just because they knew someone who’d done something wrong!”

David peered at Alex curiously. “You were never in danger. From the moment I asked I was told you were going home. And even before I asked, I had a feeling you were safe.”

That wasn’t the point. People could be angry at others being hurt, even if the others being hurt were strangers. But David didn’t seem the type to care.

Some vicious part of Alex wanted David to care- to feel bad that he had almost sentenced two people that hadn’t done anything wrong to death, one of them a child.

“Don’t you have a daughter?” Alex asked.

David offered a slight raise of his brows. “Yes?”

“She’s young, right?” Alex asked. “You said she was a lot younger than me.”

“Yes.”

David didn’t have a trace of amusement on his face anymore.

“And you work with killers. Killers who kill children who haven’t done anything wrong, if an adult makes a mistake.”

“Get to the point.”

Alex surprised himself with a sharp smile. “She’d better hope you don’t make any mistakes.”

He wouldn’t have been surprised if David slapped him. After what he’d said, he wouldn’t blame the man.

David responded, after a pause, with only a few words. “Perhaps we shouldn’t speak, after all.”

\--

His fury had worn away to a helpless exhaustion with it all by the time Yassen was back. By then Alex had made himself a bland bowl of pasta for a late lunch. David was watching him from across the room, where the man was cooking himself a far more appetizing lunch.

Alex’s stomach rolled when the aroma of David’s food hit him. It was hard to tell at this point if his stomach rolling was from seasickness, helplessness in the face of the people around him, or shame at what he’d said earlier.

“I’ll watch him,” Yassen said. “Were there any problems?”

Alex looked away.

It wouldn’t be subtle to ask David to keep Alex’s words earlier a secret, not directly in front of Yassen. Alex also wouldn’t ask even if they’d been alone. He didn’t need favors, at least not from David.

“No,” David said. “No problems.”

Yassen sat across from Alex without further questions. Alex picked at another strand of pasta, dangling it from his fork before replacing it on the plate. When no one broke the silent of the kitchen, Alex swirled the pasta around some more wordlessly, avoiding eye contact with everyone in the room.

“I found information on the other agent, from a contact,” Yassen said eventually, without preamble. “I will make use of that information when we have worked out payment.”

“Proof that he was a traitor?”

“No. We can find that later, with what I have.”

Alex smiled humorlessly. “Payment first, though?”

“Yes,” Yassen agreed. “We can talk about it privately when you’re done eating.”

Pushing the rest of the pasta away, Alex stood. “I’m done.”

Yassen’s room wasn’t spacious, but it was large enough to easily accommodate the folding chair that had been set up next to the desk. Alex took a seat. “What do I need to do?”

“We will need to contact your housekeeper without MI6 watching. Do you have a way to do that?”

“Yeah,” Alex said, thinking of the email account he had set up to contact Jack while she’d been a prisoner herself.

“Tonight, we will travel close enough to land to establish a signal, and you will contact your housekeeper. Tomorrow we will stop for a while and continue the communication, telling her how to deposit the funds where I can access them. After that, I will use what I know to help you.”

“How much are you getting at first?” Alex asked.

Yassen raised an eyebrow. “At first?”

“I’m not paying you everything upfront,” Alex exclaimed. “That’s not how these things should work.”

“Considering you are an agent for MI6, then yes, I will take all of your money upfront.”

Alex felt the worry at the back of his head mix with his upset stomach. “That doesn’t work,” he said, trying to sound more confident than he felt. If Yassen didn’t do this, and do it properly, then Alex was alone against MI6 again. If Yassen did this, but hurt someone along the way, Alex would never live with himself.

“This isn’t a negotiation.”

“That isn’t fair! How am I supposed to know you’ll follow my directions if I pay you upfront?” he bit back.

Yassen returned his look. “No, it isn’t fair. Are you worried I’ll take your money and drop you off without helping?”

“I’m worried you’ll kill someone!”

“Perhaps you should trust me.”

Alex shook his head. “That’s not enough.”

“What proof do you need of my intention to follow your instructions?”

He didn’t know. But Alex couldn’t be responsible for someone’s death just for his own freedom. If Mattley died, Alex wouldn’t care, but what if someone innocent was caught in the figurative – or perhaps, worryingly, very literal – crossfire?

“You can back out,” Yassen said evenly. “You can even back out once you pay me, if you want.”

Alex suspected he wouldn’t get his money back in that case, but that wasn’t his concern. “There had to be a way I can know you’ll be careful,” Alex pleaded. At least with paying half of the money after the task, Alex had a small amount of power. Following Yassen’s plan? Alex had nothing.

Yassen’s cold eyes stared through him. “I think you will have to trust that I have never lied to you.”

\--

Alex sent the email late that night when it was morning in England. They didn’t need to wait and check back the next day; Jack responded almost instantaneously. Alex suppressed his sense of guilt that she was so worried about him.

The email had a phone number for a sim card Yassen apparently hadn't used before. Yassen replaced the sim in one of his phones and had Alex answer when Jack called, albeit on speakerphone.

“Alex!” Jack exclaimed by way of a greeting, and Alex bit his lip. “Where are you? Are you alright? They’re asking all sorts of questions, you can’t even imagine. When are you coming home?”

“I’m sorry,” Alex whispered into the phone. He didn’t know what to say. How could he tell Jack that if he let MI6 get their way, things would be even worse, and soon? “I’m really sorry.”

“Alex.” Yassen tapped the card on the desk in front of him, and raised an eyebrow.

Alex took a deep breath, and tried to calm himself. He didn’t need the card. He’d memorized the directions. “I’m going to send an email to you, again. It has a charity name on it, and an account number, and an amount of money. I really need you to transfer that much money to the account as soon as you can. Please, don’t ask any questions, I’ll tell you everything when I get home. And don’t tell the bank!”

Jack was quiet for a moment. And then she asked, heavily, “What have you gotten into?”

“I promise it’s not a ransom, or anything like that,” Alex reassured. He almost promised her she would never guess, but he didn’t want her to try. “I’ll tell you everything soon.”

“Then what is it?”

Alex looked to Yassen for help. The man only shrugged.

His thoughts raced. The account was registered as a charity, wasn’t it? He could tell her the money was going to help people, but that sort of lie was just as bad as the charities that Desmond McCain had hated, and for once Alex agreed with the madman! “I’ll tell you soon,” Alex said, hating himself.

Jack didn’t agree as quickly as he had hoped. There was a long hesitation on the end of the line, to the point where Alex was beginning to worry. And then Jack sighed. “You need to have a good reason for this, Alex. I don’t for one second believe you’re suddenly obsessed with donating to a charity for no reason, or that it even is a charity and not a front for a ransom, whatever you say to the contrary.”

“You’ll do it?” Alex asked.

“I’ll keep looking at my email,” Jack promised.

“Alright,” Alex said. He saw Yassen glance at his watch. “I have to go now, Jack. I’m going to be home soon, I swear. I’m so sorry you’re worrying.”

“Hey there, Alex, you’re going to be alright. All that matters is you get home safe, ok? I’ll be here.”

Alex hung up before he could respond. He wasn’t sure he would have been able to find the words to end the call without worrying Jack more.

“Good?” Alex asked, after he’d taken a moment to calm his emotions.

“You can send the next email, and I will finish the rest after your housekeeper follows the directions written inside.”

Yassen handed him a second notecard with the account information written down exactly, and Alex copied it into an email to Jack. After he pressed send, he leaned back in the chair.

Alex was tired. He was sure it showed in his face, as he watched Yassen take him in. The day had been long enough without the emotional turmoil of this morning and then being left with David for a good portion of the day immediately after.

“Who’s watching me tonight?” Alex asked.

Yassen raised an eyebrow. “David volunteered to watch you for a while. Would you like to guess, or perhaps tell me, why he was so eager to take the job?”

Alex grimaced mutely. Great. He couldn’t say he would get much sleep tonight, being watched by the man he’d made such biting comments to earlier, but surely that was the point.

“Someone else could watch me,” Alex suggested weakly, knowing it wouldn’t help.

“My men aren’t here to supervise unruly teenagers. I’m not turning away the one who volunteers.”

What _were_ Yassen’s men here to do? Once more Alex had a moment of curiosity. All he knew so far was that some sort of boxes were being transported, and they’d been picked up in at least two different ports. There had to be other clues Alex could find, to bring something useful out of this whole endeavor.

Yassen frowned at him. “Unless you need to tell me that something happened?” he suggested.

Alex forced his thoughts back to the conversation – that David was watching Alex tonight, at least for a while, and had asked to do that specifically.

“No,” Alex responded. “Nothing’s happened.” Ignoring that Yassen and Alex both knew why Alex wouldn’t want to spend any more time around David, after that morning. After David sat there comforting a man they were going to kill.

“Then I’ll walk you upstairs.”

“Why didn’t you tell them to kill the others?” Alex asked, not getting out of his seat.

Yassen paused at the door. “There was no need to leave an unnecessary trail of evidence.”

“Ok,” Alex said softly. He thought better of his second question – _would you have spared them if I wasn’t there?_ He wasn’t sure he wanted an answer.

Later, the question wasn’t the only reason Alex stayed awake through much of the night. David’s off-kilter humming in the chair next to the couch didn’t help, nor did the man’s occasional sharp glances back at Alex whenever he glanced David’s way.

Alex would have given just about anything to sleep in his own bed for a night.


	7. Perspectives

Before David went to sleep that night, he wrote a note to his daughter, as he often did, that he would give her when he saw her next.

Unlike most nights, the note to his daughter wasn’t the only thing on his mind.

David didn’t hurt children. He didn’t torture them, or have them tortured, or let them die in agony. Children were innocent. Sometimes they needed to be dealt with because of their parents, and it was a shame, but it was always quick. When he’d first seen Alex, he’d been horrified. The boy was pressing a bloodied jacket around his arm; he’d clearly been tortured. Despite what Alex appeared to think, David would never condone a child being hurt.

Although, really, if Alex knew David’s boss, how innocent was the boy truly?

It didn’t matter. David was an adult, and Alex was a child. It had been petty to keep the boy up half the night. Especially a boy that David had all but rescued! Given time, the open wounds on the boy’s arm would had led to him bleeding out. The child owed David, yes, but David also owed it to Alex to show him that he was safe and would have safe passage to his destination.

_She’d better hope you don’t make any mistakes._

No, David decided, he wasn’t looking forward to when his daughter was a teenager. Children he could handle – teenagers, apparently less so. It was good that David was getting practice with a teenager now.

Alex would see the error of his fit of surliness in time. David would apologize for his pettiness, and allow the boy to ride the anger out. The child and his mother hadn’t even been killed – there was no reason for Alex to continue to complain as if a large injustice had occurred.

David would apologize in the morning. Alex would come to realize that David was not such an evil man. And David would continue to be the father that he knew he was, even without his daughter nearby.

\--

The kid was a problem child. Tomas had known it from the second day Alex had joined the ship, and he ought to have known it from the first. It had only been the second day that the kid had driven David near mad with his refusal to come inside when it was cold out. Although Tomas tended to agree with his boss – it hadn’t been near cold enough outside to hurt the kid.

But even from the first day, it should have been enough to know that the kid left tied to a chair while they finished business in port wasn’t simply a random pedestrian that had stumbled aboard. First, Alex knew Yassen Gregorovich. Gregorovich was a cold presence on the ship, constantly ensuring that the operation ran smoothly. And apparently, Gregorovich also knew a blond, serious British teenager, and was fond of him enough to take him on board during the middle of a significant undertaking. A teen who clearly _wasn’t_ on the same side as the men on this ship.

Tomas would never say that he’d figured that out. He didn’t want to cause problems, or make Gregorovich think that Tomas was thinking on the kid anymore than he needed to. Yet for hell’s sake, the kid had been petrified when David had brought up eliminating the witnesses yesterday. And when Tomas had taken Alex downstairs to keep him out of the way, both for David’s good and the kid’s own, Alex had practically left all his nails bleeding from how intensely he’d been worrying at them. The kid had a conscious, it was clear. And why were the men guarding the kid from the shipment, if not to make sure Alex didn’t figure out what was going on and report them?

The best thing to do would be to leave the kid alone as much as possible. Tomas had no desire to find out what happened to anyone that let the kid see something he wasn’t supposed to, or who let the kid get hurt. Gregorovich was terrifying enough without Tomas accidentally hurting his charge.

With that goal in mind, of course the kid was already in the kitchen when Tomas entered. Admittedly, Gregorovich was there too, so it wouldn’t be Tomas’s fault if anything happened.

“Good morning,” Tomas said, standing out of the way to allow the boy to cross the kitchen with a plate of toast, mug of coffee, and bottle of water balanced in his two hands.

“Hi,” Alex muttered.

The kid appeared tired. He had slight bags under his eyes.

“Sleep well?” Tomas asked.

The kid mumbled something unintelligible as he took a seat. Tomas looked to Gregorovich in confusion, but the man was occupied with a textbook, writing in a notebook next to it.

Shrugging, Tomas poured himself a mug of coffee, and started to grab the supplies for scrambled eggs with ham. Almost without realizing it, his eyes slid back to the kid. His hair was tousled, and he was wearing a navy jumper that was slightly too large for him. The jumper covered both of his arms, but Tomas had seen Alex’s arm earlier already. It was a mess of stitches and red lines. Whatever situation he’d been in before this, the kid had been lucky to make it through alive.

Alex must have realized Tomas was staring because he turned around.

Caught off guard, Tomas asked, “Do you want eggs, too?”

“Sure,” the kid said, blearily.

The kid was nice enough, for a problem child, Tomas figured as he watched Alex push the eggs around his plate with a dry piece of toast. The kid had been polite enough when they’d played cards the other day. He knew a lot about football, although considerably less about the Spanish speaking teams than Tomas himself knew. If only the kid wasn’t on the other side of the law.

“Good morning,” David said cheerily, striding into the kitchen. “I’ve been looking for you, Alex.”

Only the slight pause in Gregorovich’s writing indicated that their boss was listening in.

“I need to apologize for the pettiness last night,” David said. “Keeping you up wasn’t right. My daughter would want me to forgive you.” The man smiled, as Tomas wondered what David’s daughter had to do with anything, or why the man had kept Alex up. “You’re forgiven.”

Silence greeted the announcement. Gregorovich continued to write.

David waved his hands dismissively. “It’s ok, you can still be angry. Teenage moods are harsh. But if you decide to apologize, let me know. I think it’s time we got along again.”

“You wanted to kill two people,” the kid said. He didn’t sound angry, to Tomas’s ears anyway.

“I wanted to resolve an unpleasant situation.” When no one jumped into the conversation, David let it go. “Alright. I understand you’ll need time. I’ll be around. I can even watch you this afternoon if it’s needed.”

“Someone else will do it,” Alex said, at the same moment Gregorovich spoke.

“That’s fine.”

“It’s _not_ fine,” Alex refuted.

Tomas frowned. It wasn’t a good idea to argue with the boss.

Gregorovich didn’t respond, and the kid glowered. “Did you hear him? He kept me up half the night!”

“I heard that perhaps you deserved it. Unless you would like to claim you didn’t?”

The kid stabbed a piece of egg on his plate loud enough to make Tomas wince.

David, wisely, left.

Tomas resolved not to ask any questions. That resolution lasted a minute before curiosity got the better of him. How much of a problem was the child, exactly?

“What did you do that you needed to be forgiven for?” he asked.

“It doesn’t matter. He deserved to hear it.”

“Do you need to apologize?” Tomas asked.

“I’ll apologize to his daughter that her dad is shit,” the boy said mutinously.

Perhaps, Tomas accepted, the kid _wasn’t_ nice enough. Not to David, anyway.

“Stop,” Gregorovich warned.

Alex did. His next words were almost a plea. “I don’t want to be around him anymore. Someone else has to be free.”

Tomas enjoyed David’s company. The man was good fun, and kind to everyone on the ship.

Alex clearly didn’t share that opinion.

“I can stay with him today,” Tomas found himself saying.

Finally, his boss looked up from his textbook. “You can watch him this afternoon if you’d like. I will be around to watch him this morning.”

“Does that mean I’m staying in here?” Alex interrupted. “I want a nap. Your henchman who kills children kept me up at night.”

“You can stay here.”

“I have movies. He can watch one with me in the other room,” Tomas offered. They all had movies. Movies were a welcome distraction while they spent months at sea while the crew of the ship ran whatever was currently being smuggled on their familiar paths. Of course, this time it wasn’t a simple smuggling operation, from what he’d picked up. And the cargo wasn’t simply drugs, or weapons. Since Gregorovich had come on board, something else was at play.

“He will stay here. I want an eye on him when we stop.”

They were only docking for a couple of hours, and no one was disembarking. The stop hadn’t been planned until yesterday when Gregorovich ordered it.

“Alright,” Tomas said. “We can watch movies tonight instead. I have a film that features a football star.”

Alex didn’t appear enthused. He did, however, offer Tomas a brief thanks before he stood to go wash his plate.

Perhaps the kid wasn’t as much trouble as Tomas feared.

\--

Ever since Ian Rider’s death, Jack had watched Alex descend deeper and deeper into the trap set for him by MI6. At first Alex had been resistant, and then he’d been impulsive (well, more so than usual), and then rebellious, and finally there had been a point where it seemed Alex had completely given up the fight against the intelligence agencies. By the time Alex had rescued Jack, Mrs. Jones was calling Alex an agent!

If Jack was to believe Mrs. Jones, Alex had said yes to this most recent mission. He’d said yes without blackmail, even. Jack had protested. She’d told him it was dangerous. She’d asked him to reconsider, or back out. But Alex had an addiction for danger by now.

It was all Ian’s fault. Jack knew it. He’d raised Alex to be in this position, and it was all but confirmed by the fact that he’d left a child to bloody MI6, and they hadn’t hesitated to use him.

The worst of it was, she couldn’t blame the man to Alex’s face. Alex’s parents had been dead since he was a baby; Alex needed to believe he’d had at least one semi-parental parent raising him out of love, and not to be the miniature spy that Ian seemed to have groomed Alex to become.

It was what it was. Ian had raised Alex to be abused by MI6, and MI6 had abused him. And now Jack wasn’t sure that Alex could ever be the same, or if he’d even want to act as if he was the schoolboy that he’d been months before. The time with the Pleasures hadn’t helped Alex acclimate – although admittedly, that had been Jack’s fault. And then Alex had come to rescue her, and in doing so he’d put himself right back in the middle of danger.

None of this was fair. Not to Jack, and certainly not to Alex.

Alex should have had the opportunity for a normal life. What had happened to his parents and to Ian didn’t deserve to be Alex’s fate as well.

And now, what had Alex gone and done this time? Why did Jack need to transfer more money than she’d even had in savings a year ago into an account set up by a charity that Jack couldn’t find any trace of online? Alex had been adamant that it hadn’t been a ransom, but Alex had also boldly lied to her face several times before. Leave alone all the times Alex had just left out all the terrible things Jack didn’t want to but needed to know about!

And who had Alex been referring to when he’d said someone was supposed to be dead? For one long, ludicrous minute Jack had almost thought Alex meant Ian, but she had had been able to dismiss that one with common sense. Despite everything, Alex would probably be elated if his uncle was still alive. Alex hadn’t been elated.

Jack didn’t know all the details of Alex’s missions, but she knew people had died. A _lot_ of people had died. Many of them people she knew nothing about.

Was it Ash, Alex’s godfather that he’d mentioned in one phone call from Australia and then never brought up again? Was it one of the American agents he had spent time with ages ago? Jack didn’t know. Worse, she didn’t have a clue.

Jack would transfer the money, for Alex. She would do anything for that boy.

She just wished she didn’t have to.

\--

Yassen Gregorovich was supposed to remain dead in Alex Rider’s eyes. As far as Mrs. Jones was concerned, it would have been better if Yassen had actually died on that plane months ago. Listening to Yassen once before had made Alex leave Britain for SCORPIA. Who knew what a longer exposure to the man could do to Alex? It surely would deal more harm than good to the boy.

Mrs. Jones had known John Rider, long ago. She had seen the hardness in the man, already present before he went undercover, develop into an almost cruel inflexibility by the end of his time with SCORPIA. And she had heard of his protégé at the time before the days when Yassen Gregorovich was internationally wanted. Long before the man had killed four MI6 men, Ian Rider among them.

She wondered what John Rider would say now. She wondered how long it would take him to kill her for what they’d done to his son.

Mrs. Jones had lied to Alex only a few weeks ago, when she’d told him she would give him a choice. She had known at the time that she would have done whatever it took to keep Alex working for them, even if it wasn’t pretty.

She wondered, most of all, how much an earlier version of herself would hate who she had become.

It had to have been worth it. Millions, if not billions, of lives had been saved because MI6 had made the tough call to employ a teenager. Not just any teenager, but the son of a spy and nephew of another, who had been raised since birth to continue the Rider legacy.

It wasn’t fair to Alex, of course. Yet the intelligence world called for people to make sacrifices. Alex knew that by now. If he struggled with the concept a bit, it was only natural. But Mrs. Jones had accepted that Alex couldn’t become a civilian again, even if he wanted to. He had proven too valuable.

She unwrapped another peppermint. It was regrettable, what being the head of Special Operations of MI6 forced one to do. If Mrs. Jones had still had children at home, perhaps she wouldn’t have been able to look at them the same way after employing Alex Rider.

But they all made sacrifices. Alex Rider with his childhood, and her with her family.

The only question was, would those sacrifices be worth it?

Mrs. Jones rather thought they might be.

\--

Yassen had known Alex would cause trouble with David the moment after the man had made his suggestion. Alex wouldn’t have been able to see the man the same way again even if he’d wanted to, and Yassen rather suspected Alex did not.

The problem wasn’t David, Yassen knew. None of the men on board would harm Alex, knowing that Alex was here with him. The trouble that Alex might cause, however, could be an annoyance. The boy would have an outburst of moral outrage, and suddenly some problem that Yassen couldn’t have foreseen would have occurred.

Yassen inspected Alex. The boy stared back, bored. “What?”

There was little point in wasting time with small talk. “At times, you will be left with David. There will not be problems.”

Alex scowled. “Leave me with someone else, and there won’t be.”

The problem with Alex Rider was that he had faced too many powerful and rich men who were incompetent. Yassen was not one of thise men. He had no patience for a temper tantrum. “If there are problems, there will be consequences,” Yassen responded. Alex, wisely, didn’t talk back to that. “Do you still want to go to sleep?”

As Alex drifted off on the couch after they transferred rooms, and Yassen sat back with his notebook, checking his work for errors, he thought about what needed to happen next. The boy’s housekeeper had transferred money a few hours ago. Yassen had confirmed it when they’d docked and began receiving internet service again. Next, he would need to reach out to his contact with information about how MI6 suspected something. If the ruse was successful, Mattley would be contacted about a meeting. Yassen couldn’t do much to confirm that Mattley was a double agent unless they met again. The contact wouldn’t provide information on who Mattley was; Mattley would not be careless enough to leave evidence lying around.

Alex’s assignment was not the easiest task. It would take a man with skills such as those Yassen had learned, and contacts such as the ones Yassen had, to prove that Mattley was a double agent. It was, however, possible. The task was slightly more complicated with the instruction that no one was to be hurt, but those instructions were not altogether unusual, depending on the work that Yassen was doing.

Altogether, despite the boy’s dispute with David, this was going to be far easier than Yassen had worried when he had first walked into the room to find Alex tied to a chair and bleeding out. So long as nothing went wrong, Alex would be home safe soon. Yassen could continue to work on the current operation. Soon, he would be significantly richer, and his employers would be satisfied.

Yassen was far too aware of the risk Alex posed to both Mattley and Yassen’s own operation to assume that nothing would go wrong. He would have to be careful. The alternative to being careful was to get rid of Alex, and that was not going to happen.

\--

Blondish-brownish man (who’d Alex had finally discovered was named Tomas) had followed through on his own suggestion to watch Alex. It was for the best. Tomas was probably not much better than David in his own ways, but he at least hadn’t suggested killing a condemned man’s family while comforting the man. And with David intent on getting along with Alex and Yassen insistent that nothing could happen between David and Alex, the only logical solution was to keep apart from David entirely.

The movie following the Venezuelan football star was exactly as terrible as Alex had predicted. He found himself rolling his eyes through dialogue he half understood, wondering why Tomas thought showing the movie to a prisoner didn’t deserve the title of ‘horrendous war crime’.

“I’m going to grab a bottle of water. Don’t pause the movie,” Alex said, half just hoping for an excuse to not watch another second of the terrible acting the movie featured. He ducked out of the room.

Someone was speaking Spanish in the kitchen, Alex could hear it from the hall. He slowed down, listening to what he could, trying to make sure it wasn’t David inside.

His Spanish was rough, and he’d discovered the Spanish spoken by the men on board was an entirely different dialect than the Spanish he was used to from his time in Spain. But time with the men on board had allowed Alex to start to pick up more of the dialect. Alex paused right outside the door and listened in.

The conversation didn’t make sense. Alex’s brow furrowed as he tried to piece together the sentences – it was something about taking a part out of one box, and into another. Replacing boxes? For what?

By this point it was clear that David was one of the men, and Alex thought the other sounded like Kofi. Alex wasn’t planning to go inside, but he could stay and listen. This might be important.

The conversation shifted. Now it was a sort of conversation about a computer. Alex recognized the terminology from when he’d been studying for the computer contest he’d supposedly won, when investigating the Stormbreaker computers. The word RAM was repeated, again and again, along with the word Alex knew meant ‘surveillance’. Were the men inside computer nerds?

“Alex!”

Alex turned at the same time as he heard the conversation inside the kitchen stop. Tomas was looking at him from down the hall.

“Sorry,” Alex said. Tomas stared back at him, wide-eyed. “I was just avoiding someone.”

“Well, come on inside,” Tomas replied, worry clear in his voice. “You didn’t hear anything, did you?”

“No,” Alex lied.

Unfortunately for Tomas, Alex had the feeling that conversation he'd overheard really hadn't been meant for his ears.

\--

Mattley had been glad to be rid of the kid, truth be told. Who could imagine spending fourteen years of your life working in the intelligence services, only to be partnered with a child who had barely been born when Mattley had started his career?

It was humiliating. A child couldn’t do what Mattley did, either for MI6 or for himself. And to be told that the child was his _partner_ was the final blow.

When Gregorovich had promised to rid him of the child, it had been a relief. No worry over stashing the body, less paperwork to deal with – all Mattley had to claim was a serious of suspicious circumstances, and the boy was seen as a traitor to the United Kingdom while Mattley was hailed as a hero. The little brat could rot in his watery grave somewhere while no one in Britain bothered to look for him, because who looked for a traitor?

Except. There was a problem.

Mattley had thought at first it was an oversight, but MI6 didn’t make mistakes. Or at least, they tried awfully hard not to make mistakes, and paperwork was their forte. Several entire cadres of men and women filed careful paperwork for MI6, making sure it was updated daily, and every ‘t’ was crossed and every ‘i’ dotted.

But the brat’s paperwork – Alex Rider’s paperwork. It hadn’t been updated. Not to reflect his status, which was surely ‘missing or deceased’ by now.

MI6 was methodical with their paperwork, with one exception: undercover work. Then, the paperwork took longer to forge, or the trail was left intentionally blank for deniability purposes later.

That was ridiculous. A fifteen-year-old child wasn’t working undercover, and Gregorovich wasn’t a man to meddle with. If he said he was going to dispose of Alex Rider, he was going to dispose of Alex Rider.

So why did Rider’s paperwork not show an update?

This wasn’t good.

Mattley wasn’t sure what exactly was the situation at hand, but he had suspicions. If no one came back to him with talk of Alex Rider, perhaps in time he could lay his suspicions to rest.

Until that point, however, he would keep an eye on things. And if anyone did want to talk to Mattley about Rider, then perhaps his suspicions were a bit more than merely paranoia. 


	8. Lies

Alex had thought, or perhaps hoped, that he would be in the clear after Tomas returned him to watching the movie. He was wrong.

David and Kofi entered the room moments later, concern on both of their faces. Alex stared at the movie. He didn’t even know what he’d heard; if they accused him of knowing something, he planned to deny it.

“Tomas, come talk to me.” Kofi beckoned Tomas into the hall. David stayed in the room with Alex. Alex tried to listen over the movie to hear what was being said in the hallway, but he couldn’t hear even low conversation, let alone individual words.

The two men returned moments later.

“Alex, do you speak any Spanish?” Tomas asked.

“No.”

The men exchanged looks. “Why were you gone for a few minutes?” Tomas asked.

“I wanted to hear if David was inside,” Alex answered, half telling the truth. “I don’t want to be around him.”

David frowned but said nothing.

Kofi stared intently at Alex. “You didn’t hear anything?”

“Just something in Spanish. I don’t know what you were saying. I just wanted to figure out who was speaking.” Alex tried to channel the cool disinterest of Yassen. “Was it something important?”

“No,” David said.

He was lying. Whatever Alex had overheard, whatever conversation about computer parts that Alex thought he had partially understood, it related to their mission on the ship. The problem was, Alex had only partially understood the conversation, and the conversation alone wasn’t enough to make sense of the grand purpose of Yassen and co.’s smuggling operation.

“Ok,” Alex said. “So why are you all staring at me?”

They weren’t just staring. They were worried. Whether they were worried for Alex or worried for themselves, Alex wasn’t sure, but he thought Yassen might have more of a problem with the adults revealing secrets than with Alex listening in to an undisguised conversation. Yassen knew Alex was a spy. He couldn’t blame Alex for doing his job, could he?

“We’re watching a movie in Spanish,” Tomas pointed out.

“I don’t know the lines,” Alex objected. “Just the bad acting. All I know is some written Spanish, but I can’t follow anything I hear that’s not incredibly slow and from Spain. And I don’t think any of you are from Spain.”

“I’m going to say that you’re telling the truth,” David said. “And we’re not going to talk about this again. If you don’t know why I’m worried, then that’s good. But believe me, I don’t want you to be hurt. And there are certain things you might overhear that might become a problem.”

“I thought you didn’t hurt children on this ship?” Alex asked. He kept his voice innocent of the sarcasm he desperately wanted to include.

“We don’t. And I’d rather we didn’t start.” David smiled, although his smile didn’t quite disguise the concern in his voice.

After a moment of tense silence, David left. Kofi stayed a moment longer. “No one wants you in trouble,” he said.

Of all the people on the ship, the Jackie Chan look-alike might, Alex considered, but all-in-all the East African was probably telling the truth. What the men didn’t seem to realize was that Yassen wouldn’t have wanted Alex in trouble either. Alex would be home soon without any problems if Yassen had his way. And somehow Alex thought he was in less danger from Yassen than Kofi, David, and Tomas might suspect.

“I don’t want to be in trouble either,” Alex replied.

“Then you will say nothing of this conversation.”

“Sure.”

Kofi left as well, leaving Tomas and Alex to their torturously bad movie. Alex pretended to watch it as he turned over what he’d heard before in his head. Were the parts that were being smuggled related to computers? Why would that require a ship? And how did Alex overhearing what they were smuggling worry them? Surely once the items were delivered the men had no more reason to worry.

By the time the movie ended Alex was no closer to answers. However, one thing was sure: he knew more than he had an hour ago. He would have to work with that.

\--

The ship was in rough seas, and Alex was starting to feel seasick. He wasn’t often uneasy on boats, but the waves outside were wearing on him. Possibly it was the amount of time he’d spent on a small enough yacht.

“Are you alright?” David asked. The bearded man was nearly done with his plate, and he was eyeing Alex’s comparatively full one with interest. “If you don’t like what I made, I can make something else.”

Yassen was less polite. “Alex, eat something.”

Alex took a bite of the battered chicken in front of him and grimaced when his stomach immediately began to protest. “I think I’m full.”

David winced sympathetically. “Is it the waves?”

“No, it’s the company,” Alex responded rudely. Yassen had made clear enough that there wouldn’t be problems between the two of them (not without ensuring vague and ominous ‘consequences’), but Alex didn’t have to play entirely nice.

The ship rocked again.

“We have medication,” David offered, ignoring the jab.

The best medication would probably be leaving the kitchen, which reeked of the freshly cooked dinner and wasn’t helping his nausea one bit. Alex doubted Yassen would let him leave alone though.

Loathe as Alex was to accept David’s help, Dramamine or a similar medicine would help. “Is it in the same cabinet as the pain pills?”

“It should be.”

Alex crossed the room unsteadily. The medicines inside the cabinet were almost exclusively labelled in Spanish. Alex looked through them, hoping for one to say Dramamine.

“Can you read the labels?” David asked.

Alex remembered their conversation earlier. If he was being truly cruel, he could say yes, and leave David fearing what Alex might know. But that had the potential to backfire – Tomas would be in trouble for letting Alex overhear a conversation he shouldn’t, and David might report Alex to Yassen. Yassen probably wouldn’t do much, but it may mean more time on the boat for Alex, if the few words he’d heard and understood related to any sort of deadline.

“They’re all in Spanish,” Alex said. “What am I looking for?”

“Bring them here,” Yassen said.

When all six of the medicine bottles and boxes were in front of him, the man opened a box and pulled out a sleeve of pills wrapped in plastic and aluminum. “Take one of these.”

“He should eat something with it, or it won’t be as effective,” David suggested.

Alex swallowed the pill with a drink of water, then went to wrap his plate in plastic wrap and put it away in the fridge.

David watched him. “Eat at least an apple.”

Kofi and the Jackie Chan lookalike entered the room at that moment, sparing David from the retort on the tip of Alex’s tongue. Alex sat back down while hunching over and trying to ignore the urge to throw up whatever was left of his lunch.

Yassen finished eating while the rest of the men conversed cheerily in Spanish. David threw a few more sympathetic glances Alex’s way. When Yassen stood, Alex did as well.

“Stay here, Alex,” Yassen said. “I have things to do.”

There wasn’t possibly enough to do on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic to need Alex babysat by others this much, but it would be a waste of time to protest.

“I’ll keep an eye on him,” David promised.

The men were too busy in conversation to pay Alex much mind, and the ship continued to rock as waves crashed against its sides. Without the men holding their plates in front of them, it was likely a plate would fly off the table at any moment. Alex fixed his gaze on Kofi’s plate and attempted to let his seasickness subside.

The medicine did work, slightly. It also began to put Alex to sleep.

“Are you sure you’re ok?” David asked, after Alex jerked awake after nearly nodding off, with his head resting back against the wall. “We can go in the other room if you want to lay down.”

“I’m fine,” Alex muttered. He didn’t plan to rely on David.

David stroked his beard, while skeptically looking Alex over. “I don’t think so. It’s bedtime.”

David escorted Alex down the hall to the couch, with a hand on his arm. Alex wasn’t out of it enough to deem fighting David worth the potential cost. And besides, he was _tired._

He was asleep before he knew it.

When he awoke the room was still dark. Alex kept his eyes closed tightly, feeling the subtle shifts of the boat underneath him. He might still be a half-prisoner out at sea, but at least that sea was calm again.

He needed to brush his teeth. He was hungry.

If David was still watching him, he was going to keep pretending to sleep.

Alex cracked his eyes open enough to see Yassen working next to him.

“I’m hungry,” Alex said.

Yassen pulled an earbud out of his ear. “Repeat that.”

“Can I get something to eat?”

“Wait a bit.”

Alex sighed and pretended to sleep for a while longer.

“I’m surprised you’re awake this early,” he heard Yassen comment.

Alex didn’t sleep through the night much anymore. It happened, but he woke easier now than he had before. And the nightmares didn’t help.

He admitted as much before he could realize that Yassen didn’t need to know this. “I don’t sleep that much now.” Alex then hastened to explain in a way that didn’t sound as if he had a problem. “It’s not, you know, anxiety or anything. I just can’t always sleep through the night.” Storms were the worst. At least they were if there was thunder.

“What does your doctor say?”

What doctor?

Alex’s silence must have been answer enough.

Yassen exhaled. “I’m sorry, little one, that you are still involved in this life. More than you may suspect.”

The second person in Alex’s life – the only one other than Jack – to object to how Alex was blackmailed into working as a spy shouldn’t be a hired killer.

“It doesn’t matter,” Alex said automatically. “What are you going to do?”

“What are you going to do, is the better question.”

“Pay you to fix the first problem for me,” Alex retorted.

“After that?”

Alex sat up so he could shrug properly. “I’ll figure it out.”

“And if you don’t?” Yassen asked.

Well. If Alex couldn’t figure it out, he wouldn’t have much else to worry about. He’d either be so busy engrossing himself undercover, or nothing would be a concern at all anymore.

There were times Alex wished that was true, but he wasn’t so far gone that he wanted death. He just wanted to not have to worry all the time.

“I’d offer alternatives, but we saw how you took the first option out I offered.” Yassen smiled and Alex, surprised, laughed.

“I don’t want another terrorist organization after me.”

“And I would like to have steady employment. So perhaps I help you now, and don’t offer any more suggestions on work opportunities.”

“Yeah, maybe that’s best,” Alex admitted. He thought about suggesting Yassen tell him the alternatives, but Yassen’s relative good humor might vanish fast, knowing that Alex would only report what he heard back to MI6.

“What do you want to eat?” Yassen asked.

Usually Alex would say toast, but he’d skipped almost all of dinner because of the rocky seas. He could use something substantial. “I’ll make scrambled eggs, I guess.”

“Alright.” Yassen beckoned Alex to the next room.

The clock in the kitchen read 3:09. Alex had known it was early, but he’d thought he’d gotten at least a little more sleep than that. He mentally braced himself for a struggle to fall back asleep. Now that he was awake and not exhausted, it would take a long time to sleep again, but he knew he needed it.

The eggs were decent, Alex admitted when he dug in. Yassen had made coffee, but Alex rejected it in favor of more sleep.

“What’s the next step?” Alex asked. “For helping me, I mean.”

“MI6’s traitor had contacted a man I know with news that MI6 was sending in another agent after them. That man had been the one to arrange a meeting between double agent and myself.”

“Is that another meeting with Mattley, or when you found me?”

“The latter. I will need to contact my acquaintance again to arrange a meeting with the agent. I’ll say you spilled new knowledge about MI6’s involvement in our business. When we meet, I can wear a wire and hear him confess to framing you. The confession can be taped and brought to your bosses. ”

“And torturing me,” Alex added. “I want that on the record.”

“Your arm won’t be proof enough?”

Alex scowled. MI6 never believed him. “Without proof, they’ll probably blame me for being careless.”

Yassen eyed him skeptically.

“I wasn’t!” Alex protested. “I hadn’t even done anything yet. They dragged me out of bed. I was telling the truth at the dock when I said I barely knew anything.”

“That part I believed,” Yassen agreed.

“You should have believed it all. They had tortured me for information; I wasn’t going to lie.”

“I wouldn’t put it past you.”

Alex concentrated on his early breakfast for a minute, dwelling on the memory. He didn’t remember being tortured fondly and would prefer not to think of it, but something seemed off – a part he hadn’t realized before. “If you thought I was lying, why didn’t you ask more questions?”

Yassen answered easily. “I wanted them to think you useless enough that they wouldn’t mind if I dealt with you.”

The part that seemed off snapped into focus in Alex’s head. “You let them torture me even after I’d given everything up, just because that one guy had a grudge! You should have stopped them!”

“No.”

The reason was clear enough once Alex thought on it. “You couldn’t stop them without them wondering why you cared.” He frowned. “I wasn’t in a good shape. You could have stopped them at least a little earlier.”

“Oh?”

“You could have. All you needed to say was you wanted me alive.”

“I wanted you in good shape, just to kill you?”

Maybe not.

“You could have tried at least a little harder,” Alex muttered.

“You’re fine,” Yassen dismissed. “You were patched up and you are well enough now to complain about it.”

“And after David stitched me up, did he come in here and say he wanted to kill me?”

Yassen didn’t smile. “Enough. You heard an unpleasant statement once. Sometimes it is better not to react, when hearing unpleasant things. No one onboard has harmed you, or will harm you.”

Alex had several objections to that statement. He said none of them. Yassen was right, ultimately; sometimes it was better not to react.

“I’m going to miss school,” Alex said instead. “They told me I’d be back in time so I wouldn’t miss any. They only wanted me on the ship long enough to investigate the first two ports.”

“How much school have you been missing?”

“Only a bit,” Alex said unconvincingly. “The time I missed the most was mostly my fault, though. When I ran off to Italy.”

Yassen moved past the mention of SCORPIA. “What do your teachers say?”

“They probably think I’m doing drugs. Most of the kids do, anyway.” Alex shrugged. “I could tell them I spent my vacation aboard a ship with criminals who were almost definitely smuggling objects from one South American country to another. Maybe that will change their minds.”

“And the injuries?”

Alex smirked. “I wear a lot of long sleeve shirts. And anyway, my official excuse is I’ve been out sick a lot, and bruise easily, since,” Alex paused. “Well. You know.”

There were times Alex could almost start to read how Yassen was feeling, even if he was never quite sure that he was right. This wasn’t one of those times.

It would be akin to poking a bear to ask for an apology. And Alex wasn’t sure he wanted to hear that Yassen _wasn’t_ sorry.

Alex continued. “It was a good excuse. No one wants to question the orphan who lost his only remaining relative. I think it’s wearing a bit thin, though. People have suspicions.”

“And they landed on drugs.” Yassen could have been a statue. They were safely out of the troubled waters, or at least Alex hoped they were, but Yassen was exactly as unemotional as before.

“It helped that I sold cocaine behind the gym in junior school,” Alex offered helpfully, hoping to lighten the mood again.

“If you had I’m sure MI6 would take advantage.”

“Ian did well enough leaving me to them without that,” Alex retorted.

He could have jumped off the ship, for the effect his words had on himself the moment his brain processed what’d he said. “Sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?”

Alex fiddled with his fork. “Not your problem.”

“Matters that effect you seem to have a habit of becoming my problem,” Yassen said. Alex thought it wasn't meant to be an insult.

“Ian wanted me to be like him,” Alex confessed.

“Maybe eventually. Do you think he was planning to force you, if you had wanted to be something else?”

Maybe. Alex wasn’t so convinced that Ian had meant to wait much longer than Alex’s 18th birthday though, not after everything he’d learned. There had been too many isolated incidents where Ian had been proud when Alex put himself in danger, too many training exercises that Alex hadn’t recognized as anything other than a fun bonding moment with Ian in the moment. And if Alex hadn’t wanted to join MI6 – if football had been a legitimate possibility, or becoming an engineer – Ian would have been disappointed. He would have told Alex as such. And eventually, to please Ian, Alex would have given MI6 a chance.

“He wasn’t going to put a gun to my head,” Alex said, meaning as much a figurative gun as a real one.

“No,” Yassen agreed. “That wouldn’t have worked, even if it was a choice he would consider.”

“I would have done it. Joined MI6, I mean. Especially if he told me about my dad.”

They were on dangerous territory now, and on territory Alex hadn’t meant to reach. He’d never intended to talk about Ian with Yassen, or with Jack, or with anyone. It hurt to much to know that Ian had wanted this life for him, and Alex hadn’t once had a choice.

“What were you told about your father?”

Not much. Ian hadn’t liked to talk about the past, and all the family he’d lost. “Lies, mostly,” Alex answered in time. Sure, there had been snippets. One or two childhood memories, and a few facts that Alex couldn’t even believe anymore – that was it. It had left Alex open to manipulation the moment Yassen had confessed his belief that John had worked for SCORPIA.

“I’m not sure I can help with that.”

“I hadn’t been planning to ask you,” Alex admitted. He’d suspected it would hurt Yassen to relive the lies, in so much as the man could be hurt. Even if it hadn’t, some part of Alex must have believed Yassen wouldn’t have revealed much anyway.

“You can ask.” Yassen took Alex’s empty plate to clean it. “I can’t promise what I say is true.”

“I don’t need to know who he was. I think he was probably a good man, but if I’m wrong it’s alright. I just want something, anything, to know about him. Ian wouldn’t even talk about the music he liked.”

The tap turned on. Alex turned to watch Yassen as he cleaned the plate. When the tap was turned off, Yassen said, “It’s possible everything I know was a lie.”

“My dad really did like you though,” Alex said. “They told me he mentioned you.”

“Do they always tell you the truth?”

No, obviously not. They both knew that.

Alex still believed that his dad had mentioned Yassen to MI6, and fondly.

“We can talk more on this later,” Yassen said. “You should rest more, and I have to finish my exam.”

\--

The chance to talk to Yassen again so honestly didn’t occur immediately. When Alex woke from the nap he finally managed to take, Yassen was once again somewhere else on the ship, leaving Alex primarily under the management of others. When they were around each other, others were as well.

Alex kept himself occupied the first day after their conversation without problems. He peeled potatoes for an hour under Tomas’s supervision (to which Kofi had laughed and said the ship had their own cook finally), he stared at the television set, he hung out in the bridge and listened to Kofi ramble about African legends and the tv show Survivor, and he’d spend some time with loose supervision just sitting on the deck of the ship. He even lasted two hours alone with David, although he refused to talk the entire time. David read a book while Alex practiced a few card tricks he’d learned a while back. If he ever wanted to cheat at poker against Tom, it would be good to have slight of hand tricks rehearsed.

The problem came on the second day.

David and Kofi must have been talking about Alex when he wasn’t around – they must have decided he couldn’t be trusted.

Alex was teaching Tomas one of his card tricks when the two men walked into the room. David stood at the door, and looked out, and Kofi came in and said to Tomas, in Spanish, something about a problem.

Concentrating on both understanding the conversation and looking like he wasn’t, Alex continued to flip through the cards in the deck.

Alex wasn’t fluent, but at this point he understand enough – the boy’s a problem. He understood something. Question him, find out what he knows.

He tensed.

Tomas hesitated.

The next sentence Alex understood with absolute clarity: ‘We can damage his other arm.’

Alex stood and moved to the side, hands not quite yet in fists.

David only looked at him. “I thought you didn’t understand Spanish.”

Had the whole thing been a ruse?

Alex swore, loudly, using every foul word to describe a person that he knew.

“Calm down,” Kofi said. “We don’t have to tell anyone. I don’t want anyone hurt, and David will throw a fit if it's you. But we’re going to work out a deal.”

“A deal for what?” Alex asked. “I understand a bit, but I don’t know what you said before.”

“We can’t rely on that.”

Alex glared.

“It’s simple,” Kofi said. “It’s the same as before, really. You don’t know anything, and we won’t tell our boss that you are sneaking around listening in to conversations. But we are going to tell the rest of the crew that you know Spanish, or enough.”

“You said you were going to hurt me.”

“We were lying.”

Tomas objected, “This wasn’t necessary.”

“I wish it hadn’t been,” David agreed, from the door. “But teenagers lie, and Alex might have told us he would cooperate only to turn around and cause trouble.”

Alex balled his hands up. “Not more trouble than you caused.”

David smiled and waved a hand, dismissing the concern.

“Fine,” Alex said. “I won’t say anything. I couldn’t anyway. I already told you, I didn’t hear anything.”

“You’re a liar,” Kofi said. “But it’s not a problem. This deal is good, you’ll see. I promise, if you know something and say it, there will be problems, and you will take the worst of them.”

Alex went back to the card tricks after the conversation, thinking furiously that it seemed being aboard a ship of smugglers was exactly the same as dealing with MI6 or SCORPIA - he wasn't safe from threats no matter where he went, he was fully in line for the possibility of meeting potential murder victims, and in the background was the vague hope that if he behaved, he might be fed possible truths about his dad.

\--

Mattley paced in his apartment, nervous.

Something was wrong. He’d known it – well, suspected it – from the moment the paperwork in Rider’s file was amiss. He hadn’t wanted to believe it, but it was true.

MI6 knew something. That’s what the contact had said, anyway. Gregorovich had taken his time with the kid, and new information had been revealed.

But that didn’t make sense. The child had given everything up! He’d been crying desperately half the time, and he would have said anything to make it stop.

If Rider had known anything else, he would have tried to bargain for them to stop when Angel had taken the knife to the boy in retribution for damages incurred.

What was the alternative, though? The child had been left with Gregorovich. That man didn’t make mistakes – although the man had seemed certain enough that the child was telling the truth on the dock. And who really believed that the child had kept information secret for several days now? Mattley’s contact had only just received word of a problem.

Unless Gregorovich had left the child alone and locked up for a few days, to soften him up.

How had the child even survived so long? He’d been bleeding out when he left. With proper care he’d have been fine, but there was little point on wasting the resources of medical care on a boy who was only going to be killed shortly after that point.

Gregorovich had told a falsehood at some point or another. Either he’d lied about killing the boy, or he’d lied about the boy knowing nothing more than he’d said at the dock. If Rider had been involved in as many cases as his incredibly censored file might seem to indicate, perhaps the child was worth more alive to Gregorovich than dead, but in that case Mattley didn’t owe it to the man to meet him and discuss the problem.

Unless what MI6 supposedly knew put Mattley in danger as well.

Mattley took a deep breath. Alright. He would call his contact back, and arrange a meeting in Mexico, near the factory. According to Mattley’s contact, the problem could wait until after the delivery was made. It would have to – the delivery window was all but set in stone. Mattley had enough vacation time to arrange an impromptu vacation. It might be suspicious, though. This meeting would need to be worth it. And if he was going to take the time to check this out, perhaps he should arrange to have a backup as well.

Nothing else could go wrong. They were so close to the second phase of the plan, and no one involved was paid the full amount until phase three.

And maybe the boy was even still alive. In that case, there could be some fun at the end of this trip. And then Mattley would assure himself that Rider was dead, with his own eyes.


	9. The Brutal Method

Yassen watched two of his crew process the computer parts. They were transferring them from the plain brown boxes where they’d been stored since production into the labelled boxes that claimed the computer parts were standard issue from a company in China.

Tomorrow the boat would be docking in Mexico, and the product would be handed off. Money would be exchanged. Then Yassen and his crew, after stocking up on provisions, would be setting sail for England to work on the next stage of the operation.

The men on board were not the usual men Yassen was used to dealing with. He was used to working with killers. The four on board were smugglers at heart, and had only been hired for this operation because they were familiar with the routes Yassen would be needing. David – the crew’s enforcer – was the only one with experience killing. No, in general the crew were not killers, but instead men who preferred to earn more in the criminal world than they would have been offered through legal means in their hometowns. In just a few months, Yassen could pay them – and well – and he would part ways from the crew. Perhaps with their pay, the crew would even parts ways from each other. Still, despite the men not being Yassen’s usual company, they were not bad company. They left him alone well enough, they listened, and they had not offered complaint when the unexpected duty of watching a child had been thrust upon them.

All in all, the operation that Yassen was overseeing was running smoothly.

Or had been, until the previously thought of child had been thrust into things.

Before MI6 had gotten involved in the plan again by deciding to blackmail Alex into proving the double agent in their ranks, Yassen’s plan had involved dropping Alex off somewhere in Mexico. Alex would have been able to call his bosses for help, and been brought home to England without any problems. Jones, however, had interfered, and now Alex was likely safest staying with Yassen’s crew until the rogue agent was arrested.

Which lent to complications, large and small, in his work. Small complications included the crew dealing with a bored teenager who was actively poking sticks towards at least David, the crew setting a watch on Alex so that it was certain he wasn’t exploring the boat and finding things he shouldn’t, and the crew possessing one less member to repackage the parts (as one member of the crew had to watch Alex). Large complications included Yassen finding the time to come up with the desired evidence that Mattley was a traitor.

“Go relieve Shen,” Yassen told Tomas, suspecting that by now Alex would be getting antsy with sitting in the small room with only Shen for company. Tomas was, from what Yassen had observed recently, the only member of the crew that Alex seemed to tolerate for longer than a few hours at a time. Alex had gone out of his way to make it clear that he despised David, and Kofi and Shen were at best viewed with outwards distrust. With Shen, the feeling was mutual. Although the man hadn’t complained to Yassen about his new watch duties, he had sulked enough to make it clear that he viewed watching the child to be a waste of his time. The rest of the crew liked Alex well enough. Although something had clearly occurred between them and Alex two days ago. After that point, Alex had begun to eye all the crew as if they were likely to hurt him at any moment.

Yassen would have asked about what had happened if he thought there was a serious risk of Alex being hurt. Since the child was safe enough, he didn’t ask. Alex was old enough to keep himself in line. Whatever he had done to incur a warning, it would only benefit him. For at least the moment, Alex worked for MI6, and he had enemies around the globe. Learning to treat the people around him as potential threats was a wise choice.

By the time Shen joined the rest of the crew, glowering slightly, the computer parts were nearly all packaged.

“How was he?” Yassen asked.

Shen scowled. “Not a problem. Quiet.”

That was a relief, but not a surprise. From what Yassen had seen, when his men were with the child, he alternated between resentful silence, bored questions, and occasional barbed words. Sometimes he talked with Tomas, although he kept the topics impersonal.

Yassen watched as the rest of the parts were packaged away, and then the men began to walk the boxes downstairs to be stored underneath the floor again. Only once the kitchen was clear of the boxes did Yassen walk downstairs to let Alex out of two of the crew’s room.

David stopped him before Yassen got to the stairs.

“Yes?” Yassen asked, seeing David’s hesitation.

“It’s just something I was wondering,” David said. “Obviously, this didn’t happen, but Alex is a teenager. He wants to know what’s going on. What happens if he figures out something that’s happening?”

Questions such as these, in Yassen’s experience, were rarely baseless.

“Has Alex figured out something that’s happening?” Yassen asked, careful to keep his tone indifferent.

“Not that I know of. But we still have a day. What if he barges in tomorrow while we’re transferring all the boxes?”

“I would suggest not allowing that to happen.”

“Right,” David said. “Of course. I’m sure nothing will happen. The kid’s smart enough not to cause trouble.”

David was lying. Anyone who said Alex was not going to find trouble didn’t know Alex, or worse yet, had started to know the child too well and was trying to cover for him. Alex knew something. At the least, he had a suspicion of some sort.

Yassen had a sudden suspicion that the fact that Alex apparently understood Spanish had something to do with this. David had told him this two days ago, at the same time that Alex began to treat the rest of the crew as if they were not only violent but targeting him.

There were ways to figure out what Alex knew, and assess the damage. And more brutal ways still if Alex claimed that he didn’t know anything.

Yassen thought of the child who’d listened quietly last night to stories of his father, interrupting only once or twice with questions. He decided that, at least to start with, those more brutal methods would not be necessary. He would give Alex an opportunity to talk. He would hope that what Alex knew was minor enough that it could not be considered a problem. And if Alex didn’t talk, then, unfortunately, unpleasant realities would become the only choice left.

\--

“What are you going to do when you’re back in London?” Tomas asked, while Alex sat on the floor, tied hands pressed between the wall and his back, and stared at the ceiling.

“I don’t know,” Alex said. Maybe he’d have an idea if it seemed he was ever getting home, but as far as he knew, the ship was still somewhere on the Central American coast, heading due North by the day. And while heading North was helpful, if Alex had any hope to get home, the ship would also need to head East, across the Atlantic.

Yassen had said he would be here for _ten days._ Admittedly, with Mrs. Jones starting problems, Yassen had said it would take a bit longer. But they were nearing day ten and still on the other side of the ocean.

“There has to be something fun you’re going to do.”

“Not spend my time getting tied up in bedrooms by strangers,” Alex replied, only slightly bitter. “I’m too young for the hobby.”

Tomas laughed. “Wait a few years and you’ll pay someone for the privilege.”

Alex was spared from responding to _that_ inappropriate comment by the door opening. Yassen took the few steps into and across the room to Alex.

“Oh, do I get to go free now?” Alex asked. “Is it early release for good behavior? I thought I was going to be in here until at least lunch.”

“He wasn’t a problem at all, really,” Tomas chimed in.

Yassen looked over Alex in a way that suggested he expected no less, as he wouldn’t tolerate problems. “Get up.”

“How?” Alex groused. “My hands are bound behind me.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

There wasn’t any malice in Yassen’s tone. There wasn’t any sign that he was upset at all, really. But something was off. The man was looking at Alex differently than he had been this morning when he’d woken Alex at five and sent him in here to wait for a while. He looked at him differently than he had last night when he had finally sat Alex down to talk about his dad.

“I really haven’t done anything,” Alex said, uncertainly.

“That’s fine. Get up.”

It was a slight struggle to stand, but Alex leveraged himself off the floor with his bound hands pressing into the wall and offering some support. Tomas stepped forward to grab before he fell back against the wall, once he was standing.

“Follow me,” Yassen said.

Alex wanted to ask what had happened. Tomas took that task away from him.

“Did he get into something?”

“Perhaps you should tell me that,” Yassen said. “What does Alex know, and how does he know anything at all?”

Alex tensed. It came back to the conversation he’d half overheard the other day. That was days ago! And he still didn’t understand any of it.

He wished he hadn’t overheard anything. David and Kofi had already threatened him enough, and now, despite their clear wish to keep Alex’s eavesdropping a secret, Yassen had found something out.

Tomas was a strong liar. “I haven’t heard that he knows anything. What happened?”

“Perhaps nothing. I’ll find out.”

Alex tried to imitate Tomas’s confidence. “I don’t know anything. Is this about whatever you’re smuggling? I don’t care about that.”

“Follow me,” Yassen repeated.

“Did Alex get breakfast?” Tomas asked, ignoring the tension, or perhaps trying to ease it. “I can make him something to eat, if you won’t be long.”

“If you want.” Yassen left the room then and crossed the small landing of the bottom floor, opening the door to his room and leaving it open behind him.

Phantom shivers crossed Alex’s arms, going over the recently created wounds that Yassen had watched him receive.

This was crazy. Yassen wasn’t going to hurt him.

_Not unless Alex knew something that imperiled his operation._

But he didn’t!

Alex crossed the landing without another look at Tomas.

“I’d ask if you want the door closed, but maybe you should close it. You know, since I’m still tied up like a prisoner,” Alex said, bravely.

“You’ve always been a prisoner.”

That was true. Being tied up did make him feel rather more of a prisoner than usual, though.

Yassen stepped behind Alex and closed the door. “Take the chair beside the desk.”

Alex did, shuffling awkwardly into a position where his hands didn’t press uncomfortably against his spine.

Yassen sat on the edge of the bed and considered him.

“I don’t know what they think I heard,” Alex said, before he could think about it. Before Yassen could decide that hurting him was necessary. “I don’t really understand Spanish, not from South America, anyway.”

“You understand Spanish from Spain?”

“A little. I lived there for a short bit, with Ian. I could order food at a restaurant if it’s in Spain.”

“And you overheard something.” It wasn’t a question.

“I don’t know!” Alex was telling the truth. “All I heard had to do with boxes. Switching boxes. That’s all I heard. Maybe they said more, but I didn’t understand what I heard. I’m not even certain that what I heard was right.” Well, he was almost telling the truth. Computer RAMs had been involved – Alex was almost certain. But if Yassen would believe him, and stop this before it became dangerous, Alex would leave his confession as it was.

“There’s nothing else you want to tell me?”

“It was four days ago,” Alex said. “That’s all. I barely heard anything. It won’t be a problem. I won’t tell Mrs. Jones that switching boxes is involved in whatever evil plot you're working on, but it wouldn’t help anyway. That could be for anything.”

“Perhaps.” Yassen looked out the small window set near the top of his room into the ocean waves beyond. “Last night I told you some stories of John. They were good memories that I shared, I think you will agree.”

Alex pressed his lips together. He had the feeling that whatever was coming next, it wasn’t good. And he didn’t want to deal with it. He’d been grateful for the stories of his dad that he’d gotten last night – he’d said thank you, and what more could he do – but he didn’t want to know the bad.

“Alex?” Yassen prompted.

“Yes.” Yes, they had been good memories. Perhaps they had involved John lying about himself – Yassen had warned him of it, repeatedly – but they had been _something_ more than Alex had known before.

“Would you like to know what he told me about how to extract information from a person who is not cooperating?”

This was cruel.

Alex wasn’t playing this game. He’d been staying out of trouble for over a week now, and now he was getting threatened? Not even threatened with harm, but threatened with _stories._ He didn’t deserve this.

Staring at Yassen in a quiet challenge, Alex answered the question. “You know I don’t.”

“Then we will avoid that discussion, and the suggestions your father had for you. I will give you one more chance to tell me the truth.”

“I told you the truth.”

“Then you won’t worry about what the rest of the crew will say.”

Pit in his stomach, Alex replied. “I don’t know what they’ll say. Maybe they think I heard more than I did, or that I understood more than I did.”

“Who did you overhear?”

“David and Kofi.”

“Did the others know?”

Alex shook his head. Tomas at least knew, but he’d already lied to Yassen’s face. Alex would have to hope the rest of the men could lie as well, and then this would be no problem.

“I will walk you to the kitchen, then. You will stay there, and I will talk to them.”

This wasn’t fair. Alex hadn’t meant to be caught overhearing that conversation. And if he was going to go through all of this – going to deal with whatever punishment Yassen saw suit – he should have at least a better idea of what he had overheard. He should at least be some use to preventing whatever plot Yassen was involved in now.

Yassen freed Alex’s hands, and they walked to the kitchen, Alex trying to think of some way out of the situation as they did so.

Tomas was in the middle of making breakfast, and he greeted Alex with a forced smile.

“Watch him,” Yassen said, before he left.

Alex buried his head in his arms on top of the table. He ignored the sounds of Tomas walking over and placing the plate of eggs and fruit beside him.

“Trouble?” Tomas asked, worry clear in his voice.

Yes, there was trouble. There was always trouble for Alex.

_It wasn’t fair._

\--

“What did he overhear?” Gregorovich asked, and David, looking up from the book he’d been reading in his bunk, felt a stab of fear.

“I don’t,” he started, “I don’t know what you mean.”

Gregorovich didn’t back down. “I cannot deal with a situation I don’t understand. Alex overheard something. You know it. Tell me what he heard, and I will deal with it.”

“It wasn’t much.”

Despite all the insults Alex had thrown his way the past few days, David didn’t mean harm on the child. Hurting children was unpleasant, and best avoided. And David liked Alex.

David also didn’t mean harm on himself. Confessing that he’d allowed the child to overhear something could lead to that very situation.

Gregorovich waited.

The man was no fool. If David didn’t confess the truth, Kofi would mess up the story, or Tomas would let something slip, and then they would be not only the ones careless enough to allow the child to overhear a conversation he shouldn’t, but they would be liars. Somehow, David suspected that neither strike would be forgivable, but both sins together would be distinctly unforgiveable in a permanent fashion.

“I was talking with Kofi about what we needed to do before we landed in Mexico. What we did this morning. Making the devices look as if they were standard parts from China,” David admitted. “But it wouldn’t have been enough to figure out why, or what was going on. I didn’t mention his country, or the Americans, or any of the other governments. And I doubt he knows anything about computers. Even if he understood everything I said perfectly, he wouldn’t have a clue what it meant.”

“And if I ask the other men on the crew, they will confirm what you said?”

“I only talked to Kofi. Alex was with Tomas when he overheard us, though. Or I thought he was. Tomas maybe knows that Alex heard something, but not what.”

“I will confirm that. You should stay here until I return.” The words were spoken calmly, but there was no give. Arguing would be a waste of time; leaving the room now would be stupidity.

“Yes,” David said, as calmly as he could. “I’ll be here.”

\--

The eggs were cold by the time Alex mustered the energy to start eating them. He’d just finished the first egg when Yassen came back into the kitchen.

“What’d they say?” Alex asked, too worried to be subtle.

Yassen took a seat across from him, but looked to Tomas. “Alex and I are going to need the room alone, for now.”

Tomas, in what was probably the wise move, left without a word.

And then the man’s attention was back on him. “Tell me about what you did after your uncle’s death.”

“That’s none of your business,” Alex said.

“MI6 approached you,” Yassen said, ignoring him. “They offered you a mission, I assume, as you were in Cornwall. Sayle’s plan was a failure because of you. Tell me about the mission.”

“You know it already. They thought Sayle was up to something. They sent me in. I had two weeks to train first.”

“Yes, you did. Because the competition that was your cover hadn’t begun yet. What was your cover, again?”

Alex had been pretending to be the winner of a contest. A contest for computer geeks.

If Alex was a better liar, he wouldn’t have broadcast the revelation on his face the way he did. And if Alex was a better liar, Yassen wouldn’t have spotted the moment that Alex realized he’d overheard more than he thought. Computers were involved in whatever Yassen was doing. And Yassen thought Alex knew much more than he did.

“I think, despite everything,” Yassen said, “You have managed to create a problem after all.”

\--

Sunset found the ship still out at sea, a short trip away from their destination. Inside the ship, in the entertainment room, Alex lay motionless on the couch, face buried in a pillow.

He wasn’t asleep, although he may have looked it at first glance.

The child hadn’t spoken for hours. He had barely moved for the past two. Not since he’d been told that he wasn’t going home soon, and he’d run out of tired pleas. Alex had been imaginative and varied, too, in his attempts to change Yassen’s mind – _Jack will leave, I’ll fail this year, I’ll be alone and in MI6’s hands again, you can’t do this, I won’t say anything, I’ll never work for them again, I don’t even know what computers have to do with anything, please don’t do this._ The pleas might have worked if Yassen was stupid enough to imperil the operation he was running.

It was an unfortunate fact that Alex would need to stay here for now, even beyond resolving the situation with Mattley. The child knew too much. The logical solution was to kill him, but that was not an option, and they both knew it.

When Alex was less miserable, he might recognize that Yassen was being far kinder than he needed to be. Alex had gone out of his way to eavesdrop on the crew – although the crew, in turn, had put themselves in a position where they could be listened in on – and his punishment was only that he would miss more school, and be stuck here for longer than he might otherwise have been. Yassen had even, knowing Alex’s misery around the crew, taken the time out of his day to supervise Alex so that the boy did not have to deal with that aspect of his captivity for the moment.

David appeared at the door to the room, nervous in seeking attention. “We’re getting close to shore. We’ll be docked in about half an hour.”

Yassen nodded, dismissing the man. Immediately, David disappeared down the hall.

If Alex’s punishment for causing problems was lenient, the punishment for the crew would need to be far harsher. Too much leniency would allow complacency with bending the rules. And Alex was a child, and a child that had already had his arm cut open for failing a mission. The adults should bear the harsher punishment. Yassen would decide on what punishment soon. Before night fell, preferably. He had options, which he was debating between. The trouble with most of the options were that they did not work particularly well for a group that Yassen was often surrounded with, alone at sea. It might perhaps work out that leniency for the crew was the way to go, but in that case, Alex would need a crueler and more imminent reminder to stay within the confines of the expectations.

Yassen glanced at the boy laying on the couch, his arms wrapped around his head and his fingers half disappeared into the folds of the pillow, and retracted that thought. Perhaps this was cruel enough.

“Do you want something to eat?”

A short and muffled sound came from the pillow.

“Sit up,” Yassen instructed.

The hands clutching at the pillow tightened for a second, and then released the pillow. The boy pushed himself up, and gazed at Yassen with a torn expression written on his face. “I need to call Jack.”

They had been through this before.

“Or a message,” Alex whispered, before Yassen could refuse. “An email. She has to know I’m not coming home soon.”

There were limits to Yassen’s patience. “You have already exhausted that option.”

“She’ll think I’m never coming home. MI6 doesn’t tell her anything, and this time they don’t even know what’s happening. _Jack will leave._ ”

“You said this already,” Yassen reminded.

“You can’t even tell me how long until I get to go home.”

“Do you want something to eat, or are you ready for bed? I need to call a contact to resolve the situation with your rogue agent.”

Alex slumped back against the couch, and ran a hand through his tousled hair. “Mattley should have just killed me. Then she wouldn’t be worried.”

Even without knowing Alex’s housekeeper, the response was obvious. “I’m sure she wouldn’t want that.”

“It doesn’t matter what she wants. I’m going to die soon anyway. She might at least get over me soon.”

Alex was being dramatic. It didn’t suit him. The child hadn’t survived for so long and in so many situations with a death wish.

“You’ll feel better after you sleep.”

“No, I won’t,” Alex refuted. “I have _one sane adult_ who cares about me, and she’s had to stay at home while I’ve been on missions so many times, and she worries I’ve died each time. She told me. And now you’re saying I need to stay here, and she’s going to spend the entire time thinking I’m dead, because she doesn’t know you, and doesn’t know you’re not going to kill me. _She’ll think I’m dead and she’ll leave.”_

“Then she leaves. And you can stop worrying about her sitting at home thinking you’re dead.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Alex didn’t crumple into a ball of tears, but he flinched. Then, choked, he said, “You think that’s better?”

“You think it’s better, judging by earlier comments,” Yassen corrected. “Walk with me to the kitchen. You can join whoever’s eating while I make a call.”

The crew, minus Tomas, who was piloting the boat, were all seated around the table. David stared at Alex when he shuffled in. “Alright, kid?”

“He is dealing with the consequences of his actions,” Yassen said. “He will adjust. Keep him in here for the next while.”

Shen snorted. David and Kofi exchanged a look.

“Come here,” Kofi said, standing and beckoning to Alex. When Alex didn’t move forward, Kofi crossed the gap between them and put a hand on each shoulder. “It’s ok. You’re alright.”

“Is he?” David asked.

“Yes,” Yassen said, impatiently. “Keep him in here.”

Downstairs, he dialed the number of his contact. The number rang only two times before the man on the end picked up and said, in Spanish, “Hello?”

“It’s me,” Yassen said, certain his voice would be enough to start the conversation. “Have you contacted the man I asked you to?”

“I did. He wants to meet you, soon. He landed in the country you will be in a day ago. He’s been waiting for you. And he wants you to bring the boy.”

There could be risks with meeting in person. There could also be advantages. “The boy has been dead for days.”

His contact replied immediately. “That’s not a problem. He would still like to meet. And he wants to be certain the boy wasn’t lying, or making up falsehoods.”

“I would find that hard to believe,” Yassen replied, allowing his tone to indicate that the child would not have been able to hide anything. “Where are we meeting? After the delivery, I assume.”

“Afterwards, yes. There is an abandoned school near the factory.”

The rest of the call was brief. The arrangements were made; tomorrow, after the delivery was made, Yassen would go to the empty school where he would meet Mattley. Perhaps at least clearing Alex’s name would go smoothly, even if every other interaction with the boy left complications in the wake. But Yassen wasn’t prepared to bet on that. He would be prepared for difficulties, and he would make sure the crew was prepared, as well.


	10. Threats

Mrs. Jones sat down that morning with her usual determination to absorb as much news from around the world as she could. Every small detail could be crucial to national security, as she knew all too well. The intelligence briefings she received could not be ignored.

She skimmed the first paper on her desk. A trade embargo on China had grown from just the United States to now including several small nations allied with the superpower. The War on Terror continued, with the latest drone strikes in the Middle East resulting in casualties that hadn’t been anticipated. Skirmishes in the Caucuses pointed to anti-Russian Federation sentiment amongst a group of people that had previously expressed no political violence. A Pakistani spy had been captured in India, igniting international outrage.

Several classified pieces of information followed the more widely known intel. The final item on the first page was a minor internal notice, aimed mainly at keeping MI6 aware of the growing field of Internet security. HM Treasury would soon be installing their new Vikiotec computers. The new computer model had been tested and reliably slated to be among the world’s most secure computers, and several European government offices had already installed Vikiotec’s latest computers in internal agencies and departments in the previous months. According to the briefing, the Americans had also just decided to install some of the new models at Langley. Their computers would arrive from the same source in Mexico that would be shipping the Treasury their computers in a day. Within a week the new Treasury computers would be online.

Mrs. Jones read through the next two pages while wishing she’d made a second cup of strong tea that morning.

“Send Crawley in,” she told her secretary when she’d finished reading the daily briefing.

Moments later, with Crawley sitting across from her, they began to dig into the logistics of several current operations around the globe. When she was satisfied that none of the operations were currently floundering, or in one case, that there was nothing immediate they could do to prevent it from floundering further, they moved to the final matter she wanted to discuss.

“Do we have updates on Alex Rider?”

“No,” Crawley admitted. “We haven’t heard anything for several days. Not since your last call to Gregorovich. He said he’d be releasing Alex around now, but we haven’t heard from the man since. And Starbright said she hasn’t been contacted either.”

“What’s Alex’s excuse for missing school?”

“The flu. It’s the time of year where it can get around, so it made sense. And of course, we’re hoping he’ll be back soon.”

Mrs. Jones hoped for that as well. Alex would be back soon, and then she could discuss with him his next mission, where he could be kept safely out of Mattley’s reach. That, or Gregorovich would cave and provide evidence that her agent was a traitor, and then Alex would be sent back to school for at least a short time, if he wasn’t needed. But relying on Gregorovich to change his mind and take an action that didn’t benefit himself seemed an idea destined to fail. Even if his actions helped Alex, Gregorovich was not a man that would go out of his way to help others.

Then again, it was for Alex. The one person who the man seemed to care about at all. Perhaps Gregorovich would drop Alex off with proof that Mattley was a traitor simply because the alternative would be Alex going on more missions and being in some amount of danger. That would be ideal. With proof that could be presented to her superiors if asked, Mrs. Jones could go ahead and take care of the matter internally. And perhaps nothing would come up that would even require Alex’s attention, if he didn’t need to be kept out of Mattley’s way.

“Keep an eye out for him,” Mrs. Jones said. “The moment Alex Rider is found, I want a call. To my personal number if need be.”

\--

“What happened?” Shen asked, after Yassen had left the room.

Kofi’s hands tightened on Alex’s shoulders. “Tomas was careless. He let the kid overhear something he shouldn’t have heard.”

Tomas hadn’t been the one having the conversation, but Alex didn’t care to correct the man.

“We told you,” Kofi said, this time to Alex. The African let go of Alex’s shoulders. “We told you this would be worse for you, if the boss found out what you knew.”

“I don’t know what I know,” Alex replied, too tired to continue arguing that he didn’t know anything. He knew what they were smuggling involved computer parts, and apparently, that was either enough on its own, or Yassen thought that he knew more.

“Let him sit down,” David said. Kofi gestured to the bench at the wall next to where he had been sitting, and Alex took the seat.

“What happened?” Kofi asked. “Is it already over?”

Alex choked back an upset laugh. No, it hadn’t already happened, but it was going to start any day now. Whatever day he could have been going home would pass him by and Alex wouldn’t even know it. He could have been home, hugging Jack and telling MI6 to shove off, and instead he would be here, supervised and surrounded by criminals. His school holidays were already over, and they would continue to be over. This time kids at school wouldn’t miss him. Alex had already missed so much school that more time gone wouldn’t raise any concern. After all, Alex was _sickly._

This time his classmates wouldn’t write a card. They hadn’t the last several times, either.

“That bad?” There was sympathy in David’s voice. Fake sympathy, probably.

Alex didn’t owe them the truth. But there was no point hiding it. They’d find out soon enough. “I’m not going home.”

“You’re staying with us?” Shen asked, scornfully.

“That’s it?” Kofi and David looked at each other again. Clearly, by Kofi’s comment, the two didn’t think the punishment was quite as serious as Alex did. Then again, Alex was the only one that understood what it meant. Jack would leave, and MI6 would have Alex all to themselves when he was finally free, and Tom would get more distant, and everything would get worse.

“Yeah,” Alex muttered. “That’s it.”

Alex hadn’t even _done anything._ It was the worst out of all of this because he didn’t know what he knew, or why knowing it involved computers was so terrible. And he hadn’t brought it up to Yassen – the man had just known something was wrong. Which meant one of the men had said something. They’d threatened him with harm to keep him quiet and then said something themselves, and Alex was the only one who seemed to have his life made worse because of it.

“He might not have been upset,” Kofi said, still to David.

“I doubt it,” Shen disagreed between bites of his dinner. “Tomas just hasn’t found out what’s coming for him yet, or he’s being dealt with now.”

A mean thought caused Alex to force a bitter smile. “Tomas isn’t the only one that should be worried, then.” 

“The kid wasn’t hurt,” Kofi reassured David, possibly as a way to assure themselves that whatever Yassen was going to do, it wouldn't be terrible.

David frowned. “He’s a kid. He shouldn’t be hurt. Leave those types of lessons to adults.”

Ironic how it was fine to kill children to leave a message, but not hurt them. Everything about David was an irony. At least now David and Kofi had no more reason to threaten him.

Alex spotted three plates on a stack at the edge of the counter, next to what was left of dinner, and assumed one was for himself. Without an appetite, he stood and grabbed some of the dish that slightly resembled a quesadilla. He ate while the men made strained conversation about fishing, although Kofi seemed to have lost his appetite.

He’d almost finished dinner when Yassen reappeared. The man looked at Shen. “Go relive Tomas. Tell him to find me.” Then he glanced at Kofi and David. “You will both stay.”

Alex ate his final bites of food while they waited for Tomas. Yassen stood next to the bench Alex was sitting at, at the corner of Kofi’s chair. When Tomas appeared and took in the scene, the man inhaled sharply, but said nothing, and he moved to sit in the lone empty chair.

Yassen waited a minute before he began. Alex wondered if the minute of quiet had been calculated to inspire fear. Judging by the still of the room, it was working.

Yassen broke the silence. “Alex, although somewhat reluctantly, has worked for MI6 for over a year.”

The attention of the men swung to Alex. Tomas’s eyes narrowed, and Alex could almost hear the man think that he knew Alex was a problem child.

“I did not think that it would be necessary to share that knowledge, in order for my directions to be followed.” Yassen smiled without amusement. “That was apparently wrong.”

He continued, “Alex may not have willingly worked for MI6 in every instance, but his personal beliefs line up with the work they do. If he is given information that he thinks would be useful to his agency, he will give it to them. I don’t think I need to say why allowing him knowledge of our current task was not to our benefit.”

“I wouldn’t,” Alex said, knowing it was hopeless. “And I don’t know what I’d tell them.”

“He could not have known what he does without help from others. Everyone in this room, from what I have been told, has played some part in telling Alex about things he should not have heard. I wanted him on board only long enough that Alex did not have time to tell MI6 what ship to look for, and now Alex will be here longer.” Yassen’s voice softened. “That, I think, is punishment enough for him for now.”

Tomas saw Alex’s expression and grimaced.

“I am going to be lenient, once. I will avoid docking your wages. Instead, the three of you, and the three of you alone, will oversee watching Alex while he stays with us. If that means any of you misses some amount of sleep, then that is on you to figure out. If he acts out, it will be on you. If his acting out leads to lost time, I will dock pay. And if he hears anything else that he should not, the punishment will not be lenient.”

The men might have thought Yassen had finished talking. Alex did. And then Yassen said, “You are all here of your free will, and employed by me. Alex is not. If anyone was thinking of being careless, think of this: if Alex hears anything that he should not, I will have him hurt. Whoever allowed him that information will be the one to hurt him. And it will continue until I feel that the lesson is learned.”

For men that had threatened to cut into Alex’s arm days ago if he talked, none of them appeared visibly thrilled at the thought. Tomas went so far as to turn away, fixing a stare at the floor.

“Is that understood?”

“Yeah,” David said. “We understand.”

“Alex?”

Alex had heard him. He nodded, not wanting to speak.

“I will leave the four of you to decide how you will prevent that from happening, then.” And Yassen walked to the other half of the room and made himself a plate of food. While David, Kofi, and Tomas examined each other and Alex, Yassen left.

“Don’t cause trouble,” Kofi warned. “I’m not beating you up. I’m not here to hurt kids.”

Then Kofi was working for the wrong man.

“David,” Tomas said. “Kofi’s right; that’s not why I’m here.”

Being beaten wouldn’t be unusual, given the past year. But the men considering Alex right now seemed to think that he were made of glass; as if physically hurting him would be the worst thing that could happen.

“We won’t let him hear anything,” David said. “None of us want him hurt. There can’t be any slipups. Alex, do you hear me? You’ll be fine if you aren’t looking for trouble. You need to follow directions, and everything will be fine.”

Alex hoped that was true. If that was all it took, he wouldn’t cause trouble. Not because he was afraid of whatever torture Yassen could devise, however unpleasant, but because all he wanted was to go home. He would do whatever it took for that to happen, as early as it could happen.

\--

The previous night, they had docked shortly after one of the more terrifying conversations of Tomas’s life. And now, as Tomas reclined in the armchair next the couch Alex was lying awake on, the earlier threat ran through his mind again.

There had to be some grounds to object to hurting a child without losing his wages or life. Not that Tomas intended to be in the situation of needing to act out hurting Alex, but he hadn’t intended Alex to overhear anything in the first place. And it was on David and Kofi more than Tomas; they had been the ones to talk about their operation down the hall from a boy who was obviously not on their side.

And more than that – Alex worked for MI6! How many nations could claim they had a teenage spy?

Alex shifted on the couch, as if knowing he was being considered.

Tomas hesitated only a moment before confirming what he’d been wondering since last night. “You really do work for MI6?”

“No.” Alex answered. But, Tomas considered, the kid hadn’t objected last night when Gregorovich had said that he worked for the agency.

“I knew you weren’t working with us,” Tomas said, instead. “Even if you prefer to be on the right side of the law, though, you would have been better not working for them.”

“ _Helpful,_ ” the kid responded.

Tomas had more questions, but he let Alex rest. It was early, before anyone that needed to be awake had woken for the day. Well, the boss might be awake. It was hard to know with him. But the others would be asleep for another hour, and even in an hour it would be early morning still. The only reason the crew needed to rise this early was to prepare for the shipment. Why Alex was awake so early, Tomas didn’t know, but he had guesses. The kid was being held against his will with threats of pain resting on his shoulders – it wasn’t hard to imagine he had trouble getting through the night.

David was the first of the rest of the crew to rise. He came to relieve Tomas from guard duty, smiling all the while. “Good morning! Alex, you’re awake. That’s good; I needed to wake you soon if you were asleep. We have a lot to do today. Are you ready for breakfast?”

Tomas excused himself from the room, and headed downstairs to take his usual long morning shower. After he was dressed in fresh cltohes, he went to breakfast. Everyone was awake, but unlike the usual chatter of the table, the room was almost quiet. Early morning could do that, Tomas accepted, before he saw the averted eyes around the room and realized more was at play than exhaustion.

“ _How long_?” the kid asked in a low voice. He was sitting at the table that was crowded with everyone except Kofi and Tomas.

Gregorovich’s tone was cool. “The ideal plan would be two weeks. We may be up to a month if we are unlucky.”

“I have to call her, before we leave and it’s not an option _. Please_.”

Even Shen appeared uncomfortable to hear the conversation, and Shen had been moaning about Alex being here since the boy had appeared.

“Enough.” Gregorovich stood, leaving Alex at the table . “I'm going to check on the truck. I’ll be back shortly. Tomas, stay with Alex. Make sure he can’t hear anything, and that he remains out of trouble.”

“Ok,” Tomas replied. He waited until he heard the door leading outside to ask, “What happened?”

“He saw the supplies we needed,” Shen said, tapping the long list under his left hand. “All the food we’re stocking up on, as well as everything else. He knows how long we'll be at sea.”

Alex crossed his arms and hunched over the table, looking miserable.

They were going to be picking up a satellite dish for internet before they crossed the Atlantic, but it was clear Alex didn’t know that. He must have thought they would be without a way to contact whoever he wanted to talk with until they were across the ocean. 

“We’re not going to be all alone at sea,” Tomas said.

“I know I won't be alone,” Alex muttered. “Just what I asked for at Christmastime. A month crossing the Atlantic with all of you.”

“No,” Tomas expanded. “I mean we’re going to have internet. Whoever you’re trying to contact, you might get a chance later.”

He regretted it the moment Shen looked at him with a dark glare. Alex, in contrast, took in a shaky breath.

David began gathering the plates around the table. Alex had barely touched the toast on his, so David left it. “Don’t raise his hopes.”

“I’m not. I didn’t say he’d get to contact them.” Tomas reconsidered what he’d said, realizing it was a false hope. “If you were told to drop it, you should drop it. The boss has to ok whoever you want to contact, and if he said no, there’s no point arguing.”

“But it'll be possible?” Alex pressed, straightening up. “If he changes his mind, I’ll have a way to talk to someone?”

David clucked his tongue. “Yes, but it might not happen. It _won’t_ happen. The boss said no.”

“I can ask again.”

“You shouldn’t,” Tomas said. He wished he could take back his attempt to reassure. “Just forget it. I’m sure your mom, or sister, or whoever knows you’re safe.”

“She doesn’t.”

“Safe?” Shen questioned. “Kofi told me what happened last night. He’s only safe if none of you mess up.”

“Shut up and let him breathe,” Kofi snapped. It was unlike Kofi to snap - Tomas wasn't sure he'd ever heard the man raise his voice before. The conversation from last night must have been weighing on him as well.

“I’m fine,” Alex said. He took another deep breath. “No one’s going to hurt anyone. I’ll convince Yassen to let me call who I need to call. If I can at least call, maybe it will be alright.”

Shen didn’t object, although Tomas could see the man’s disdain for that idea written across his face.

Tomas smiled weakly, fighting the feeling that his words of encouragement had only set up Alex for later disappointment.

\--

After checking that Tomas had Alex safely out of the way in one of the bedrooms on the lower floor, Yassen supervised the men taking the freshly repackaged boxes with the computer memories to the truck. With the help of everyone except Tomas, it took only a half hour to load the few hundred boxes onto the truck.

David joined him in riding in the back of the truck to the factory. At the factory, Yassen supervised the boxes being unloaded, and then he joined the supervisor of the factory to watch a computer assembled. “We will start shipping these tomorrow, now that we can put the RAM into the computers,” the shift supervisor said. “They should be online soon. Perhaps they will be operational in a week.”

“There’s time,” Yassen responded. And there was. His employer would not begin the operation until he and his crew were in the middle of the Atlantic, untraceable, and outside of any nation’s national boundaries. “Your men will have the satellite ready by tomorrow?”

“Yes. I'll have it delivered to you at noon.”

“And there have been no problems? No unusual activity? Nothing out of the ordinary?”

“There is nothing to be suspicious of,” the supervisor replied. “I keep my workers busy, and pay them well. And one RAM looks like another; as long as they are packaged like every previous shipment, no one would have reason to be alarmed.”

Yassen nodded, once, in acknowledgement of the man’s efforts. It was what he expected. If there had been problems at this late stage, things could go wrong easily. For the sake of the supervisor’s health, it was good that things ran smoothly.

“Call me if there are problems. I will be here for one more day.”

The supervisor was relieved to see him leave.

David was waiting in the parking lot to the factory with a taxi. While Yassen had inspected the factory setup, David had found them transportation.

“Where is he taking us?” David asked.

“Nearby.” Yassen listed the address of the abandoned school. The bemused taxi driver said he knew it.

They arrived outside of the crumbling three-story building well before the meeting was to occur. “Wait outside,” Yassen instructed. “Avoid being seen, if you can.” Then he entered the school, after checking that the small recording device clipped to the inside of his shirt was turned on.

Mattley was already there. He was standing in front of the crumbling stairs in the main hall. Light from the daylight outside shone through half-broken windows, dimly lighting the interior of the school. 

“You’re early,” Yassen observed.

“As are you.” Mattley was obscured by shadow, making his face difficult to make out. “Is the boy with you?”

“I’m sure our contact told you that he was dead before this meeting was arranged.”

“I wasn’t sure whether to believe him.”

Annoyed, Yassen asked, “Why wouldn’t you?”

The faint sound of footsteps – more than one pair- on uneven tile sounded behind Yassen.

Mattley took a step forward, into a ray of light from outside. “You’re smart enough to know why this meeting doesn’t make sense. Or at least I thought you were.”

Yassen turned, as the footsteps got louder, to see David walk into the dimly lit hall. His arms were raised loosely in the air. Another man was behind him, with a gun pointed at David’s back.

“I also thought you might have been smart enough to bring armed backup,” Mattley said. “But I can see that was wrong, as well.”

“If you have a point, make it now,” Yassen responded, annoyance now inching closer to cold anger. “Unless you plan to kill me, and destroy the entire operation.”

“I don’t plan to do that at all. I have nothing against you, really, although I’m starting to suspect you may have something against me. Why, I couldn’t say, as it’s not like you’ll get more money if I’m out of the picture. And I would lose my share entirely if you were dead. So no, I don’t plan to kill you.”

“Then what is this?”

Mattley shook his finger. “What I can’t figure out is why it took so many days for you to realize that the spy knew more than he did. It’s not as if a child is trained at resisting interrogation. I know he hasn’t been, as I’ve read his file. Which led to another interesting point. His file doesn’t say he’s missing or dead. Believe me: my, shall we say, ‘legitimate’ employers are punctual with their paperwork even if they’re useful at little else. Something is going on.”

Mattley gestured at David, and the man behind him put his free hand on David’s shoulder, pushing him onto his knees. David, glaring, followed the unspoken order.

“I'll tell you what I think is happening, after a few questions. Now,” Mattley said, “I’m afraid I really must insist on an honest answer to this first question, or things might begin to get messy. _Is Alex Rider still alive?_ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have learned more about computers when researching for this plot than I thought I'd ever know about computers. In fairness, however, I still don't know that much.


	11. Anxiety

“I killed him days ago,” Yassen answered, coldly. “Would you like to hear how?”

“Yes. But not from you.” Mattley looked at David, kneeling on the floor littered with broken tiles. “Tell me about how the boy on board was treated. Tell me how he died. The more details the better. And if your answer is anything close to ‘fuck off’, I’ll have your throat slit. I don’t need _you_ alive.”

“I don’t know,” David answered. His tone was resentful, yet his voice was steady. “It wasn’t anything to do with me. I stitched up his arm, because I was told to, and then the boy was bundled into a small room. I didn’t even know he’d been killed.”

“You never saw him,” Mattley repeated.

“Not often.”

“What was he like when you saw him, then?” The question could have been asked with only mild curiosity.

Yassen itched to reach for his gun.

David hesitated. He glanced to Yassen for only a second, but they all knew it was a mistake in the second it happened.

“Say,” Mattley began, deceptively cheerful. “How long would it take you to get to your boat?”

“I don’t know,” David responded.

“Guess.”

“Forty minutes.”

“Alright. Well then, you are lucky. I will give you an hour and a half to get the boy back to me, alive if possible.”

“His body is gone,” Yassen said.

“ _I don’t believe you_. Not that Alex is dead, and not that he is gone, either. And I don’t know why you kept him alive, or what the connection is – whether you were going to sell him, or hurt him later, or keep him for reasons I wouldn’t want to know. It doesn’t matter. Your man here will go fetch the boy to me while you stay here, and if the boy is not here in an hour and a half, I will begin hurting you. You are worth a lot to our operation alive, but I don’t think you’ll die if I shoot a finger off.”

“Now take any weapons you’re carrying out and kick them along the floor to me, before there are problems.”

\--

Alex was watching an old World Cup match with Tomas with the internet connection that could be established at shore, while in the back of his mind he approached his plan to get Yassen to let him connect with Jack.

The match wasn’t a terrible backdrop to his thoughts. It was worth a faint smile every time Tomas raised his glass of water to the screen. More important, however, were his plans.

He felt, although perhaps he was wrong to feel it, optimistic. He had choices, running the gamut from bribing Yassen into letting him contact Jack to appealing to the assassin’s inner morality (that applied exclusively to Alex). And it wasn’t as if he had to succeed in his first attempt. Now that he knew the boat would have a satellite, he knew he could reach out to Jack at any point, so long as Yassen was suitably persuaded into believing it benefited himself in some way.

The match was just about to become his main focus, now that Alex was satisfied that he could – probably – keep Jack somewhat in the loop, when David appeared.

Something was wrong.

Alex knew it at once. He couldn’t even necessarily say how he knew that something had gone poorly, although David’s grimace upon seeing him could have been a clue, but the hairs on the back of his neck stood up anyway.

Shen was following David. “Tomas,” David said. “Go get Kofi. Now.”

“What’s happening?” Alex asked. And where was Yassen if something had gone wrong?

David shook his head, brusque. “I’ll say when we’re altogether.”

Kofi emerged with Tomas moments later.

“Everyone sit,” David said. He stayed standing himself as the others took seats around the kitchen table. The moment everyone was seated, he began. “A man who knows Alex is holding Gregorovich hostage until I bring Alex to him. If I bring anyone else with me, Gregorovich will be hurt. If I don’t bring Alex, the man will start hurting our boss until he gets Alex.”

Fear and worry were ice in his veins.

Mattley.

Yassen hadn’t said that he had a meeting with Mattley. Hadn’t mentioned that the man would be in Mexico.

And now Mattley wanted Alex, or Yassen would be hurt.

“Is there a deadline?” Shen asked.

“Yes.” David, guiltily, looked at Alex and then away again. “And it took me longer to get here than I realized. I need to leave in fifteen minutes to make it.”

“No,” Tomas said, stunned. “You can’t.”

“Do you want to get paid?” Shen asked. The man looked at Alex. He was the only one who seemed able to look at him for the moment. “Sorry.”

Kofi glared at David. “And what happens to the boy if this man gets him?”

“I don’t know,” David admitted.

Alex didn’t have any questions about it. “He’ll kill me.”

The room, already smaller than a kitchen in most houses would be, seemed to close in on them. Alex was a frozen prisoner in a cell that was getting smaller and smaller by the moment, while an executioner outside was the only release.

There was a silence filled with scared glances. It felt a long moment, but could have only been a minute.

Alex took a deep, shaky breath. “I guess we need to go now, before Yassen is hurt.”

“That won’t happen.” Tomas stood, as if to get in between Alex and the door, despite that Alex was still sitting down.

“I can’t not go.” Someone else’s life was on the line. And while Yassen was far from an innocent civilian caught in the crossfire of a massacre, he was only in that position because Alex had asked him – had paid him, yes, but had asked him – to help. If Alex stayed away, he would never forgive himself.

“Wait,” Kofi said. He stood abruptly, and started to leave with rapid speed, saying as he left, “Don’t go yet.”

The kitchen continued to close in as they waited. Kofi was back moments later with a small box that he was opening as he came in. “We’ll put this in your shoe!” he said, pulling out a flat white square about the size of a cracker.

“What is it?”

“It’s for lost or stolen phones,” Kofi said. He handed it to Alex. “I hook it up to my phone and we can track you. You can be taken anywhere, and we can follow you.”

It wasn’t guaranteed to work, but just an attempt at a tracking device was better than nothing. Alex examined the small square in his palm and, while he didn’t smile, he felt a sliver of hope.

The next few minutes were hushed and rushed. David had a taxi already waiting outside the dock to take Alex and himself back to where Yassen was held. Tomas called another taxi, so that at least two of them could follow to a place nearby to the meeting location. Kofi connected the tracker device to his cell phone, and then they put it in the trainers that had been bought for Alex.

“It will be ok,” David reassured Alex at one point, clapping him on the shoulder.

Alex didn’t bother to return the empty words. It wasn’t guaranteed to be ok, and nothing said by any of the men could change that.

Then David was rushing Alex out to the waiting taxi.

Walking to the taxi, Alex thought to himself, felt akin to walking to the previously thought of executioner’s block.

The taxi was waiting outside the gate of the dockyard the boat was resting in. Alex glanced at the name of the dockyard, hoping he would see it again. And finally, they were driving through a Mexican city that Alex didn’t know, weaving in and out of traffic that felt as if it were working against them, and the pit in his stomach was larger and larger.

David and the taxi driver had a long conversation in Spanish about the price when they stopped outside a building that seemed to be abandoned. Alex ignored the negotiations and stepped onto street. He read the sign outside the building. It was an old school assuming Alex was understanding it correctly.

When David got out, he put a hand on Alex’s wrist to hold him back for a moment, as if Alex was about to run into the building alone.

“Wait,” he said. “Just in case. If there’s any chance for you to get out alive, don’t worry about anyone else. Just run, as fast as you can. Please.”

Alex pulled his wrist free.

“Alright,” David murmured. “Let’s go.”

The door to the school was hanging off its hinges.

Yassen was inside. He was standing against a wall, with a man Alex didn’t recognize standing a few meters away, gun pointed at Yassen.

And in the middle of the room, stopped mid-pace, was Mattley.

“Alex Rider!” he exclaimed. “I knew you were alive.”

“I had hoped you weren’t.”

“Very clever. Very smart. We’ll see if you’re still speaking like this soon, though. Come here.”

Yassen, eyes boring a hole into Alex, shook his head. “Stay there, Alex. You aren’t leaving with him.”

“Yes, he is.” Mattley strode forward and grabbed Alex by the forearm. Then he pulled a gun out of a waist holster, and pressed it to Alex’s side. “He’s a little young for the pain I have planned, but my conscious will live with it. But as we’ve discussed while we waited, you lied to me about him. And to our employers about him. I don’t care to know why. But rest assured – if you cause me any more problems, our employers will know about this whole sordid affair. And I will cause the boy more pain in retribution if he’s still alive.”

“It’s alright,” Alex said, directly his words at Yassen. “There won’t be any trouble.”

David, still in the doorway, said, “My boss and I need to leave now.”

“And I’ll let you go in just a minute. But some terms first – don’t follow us. Don’t cause trouble. You can find your weapons in one of the rooms off the hall, but it won’t be an easy search.” Mattley smiled at his man. “You can go your own way once Alex and I are gone. Meet me where we met earlier at 2:00 for the rest of your payment.”

“No.” Yassen shook his head. “Those terms will not work. I will give you once chance to go, without Alex, without my killing you.”

Mattley sighed with an exaggerated air. “Argue with me anymore and I’ll have you your man killed, or you hurt. This is over. It’s been fun, but goodbye.”

Alex felt a small shove from the gun towards the door.

Yassen and David didn’t move. They watched Alex as he was pushed out the door with a gun in the back.

The bright light of the only slightly cloudy day outside was a stark contrast to the dim light inside of the school building. Alex, blinking, was directed down a street. Although a few people were walking by on the street, none seemed to notice the gun at his back. If they did notice, they didn’t care.

They rounded the corner and arrived at a beaten up maroon car. Mattley had Alex sit in the passenger seat, keeping the gun aimed at him all the while. “Look in the glovebox.”

Alex did. Inside was a pair of handcuffs.

“Put them on,” Mattley ordered.

When the man was satisfied that Alex was cuffed, he holstered his gun and reached into the car to check the cuffs were secured. Then he patted Alex’s chest and over his jean pockets, as if looking for a phone or bug. When he found none, he straightened out of the car.

“Now don’t fight.” Mattley chuckled to himself. “I don’t think it will go well.”

Alex didn’t recognize the roads as they drove away, following whatever route Mattley had memorized. He supposed it meant they were getting further from the dockyard.

He hoped the small chip in his shoe was sending a signal that could be tracked.

Mattley hummed as they drove. “Could you turn the radio on?” Alex asked at one point. “There’s an annoying drone in my ear. It sounds like someone dying.”

“Have your fun now,” Mattley responded. And then he resumed humming.

They parked in a parking garage underground. Mattley took the handcuffs off him long enough to walk him at gunpoint into the hotel attached to the garage. They took the stairs up three flights, and then Mattley used a key card to let them into the room, before he tossed the handcuffs onto the bed at the back of the room.

“Put the cuffs back on and sit on the bed,” Mattley directed.

Alex did. The moment he did, Mattley holstered his gun again. He walked forward to the bed. “If you make a sound, little bastard, I will hurt you worse,” he promised. Then he slapped Alex, hard, with the handcuff keys in his hand.

While Alex straightened out, an imprint of Mattley’s hand on his cheek Mattley dumped the keycard and silver handcuff keys onto the night table next to the bed. Then he opened the night table drawer and pulled out two ties. “I thought I’d make sure I had a time worth coming to Mexico for,” he said, “before I take you somewhere to kill you. But don’t worry about that yet. I think we may have two days in front us, still. My flight home isn’t until then.”

He left one tie on the bed while rolling one up neatly. “Open your mouth.”

Alex grit his teeth together and glared.

Mattley tutted. Then he strolled to Alex and pinched his nose. Alex raised his cuffed hands to try to protect himself, but his struggles were futile. Mattley began to count, softly, under his breath. By the count of thirty four, Alex had opened his mouth to gasp a desperate breath. Mattley forced a hand into the boy’s mouth and held it open while the rolled up tie was shoved inside.

A few grunted words were attempted behind the tie, but they couldn’t be made out. Mattley smiled. And then he took the other tie and wrapped it twice around Alex’s mouth and head before tying a knot in the back of Alex’s head.

“Let’s discuss rules. There are only two. Rule one: if you make any noise, I will add it to my tally. Whatever total I end on tonight will be the number of times I hold you underwater in the bathtub after I’m done with everything else for the day. Rule two: if you disobey, I will hurt you again. Is that clear?”

Alex only continued his bitter glare.

Mattley took several of strands of Alex’s longer hair, twirled them around a finger, and _pulled_. A suppressed whimper escaped the gag as Alex’s head was pulled forward and against Mattley’s hand.

“I suppose I have three rules,” Mattley mused aloud. “Rule three: acknowledge what I’m saying, or I will hurt you worse. Clear?”

Alex nodded a little, as much as nodding would allow without making the hair pull more. When Mattley released him, there were tears welling in his eyes.

“Now stand.”

Alex stood, directly in front of the bed. Mattley strode to the suitcase in the corner, and opened it. Inside was a stocky branch that was just short enough to fit in the large piece of luggage. “I went hiking last weekend, before I had to cross the ocean but after I knew I was coming to this country. I saw this branch while I was in the woods, and thought it would make for a fun game. And now we’re going to play that game. It’s called ‘stand still, and don’t make a sound’. We wouldn’t want the neighbors to hear. What would they think is happening, after all?”

Mattley held the stick in one hand, assessing Alex. And then he took a step closer, and then another, until he was just in front of him. Alex tensed.

The blow knocked him back, into the footboard of the bed. Alex grunted into the gag.

“One tally,” Mattley observed. He whipped the branch into Alex’s head, and Alex fell to the side, onto the floor. Another slight and pained grunt could be heard. “Two. I think you’re going to have a world of hurt to contend with when this is over, don’t you?”

Alex pushed himself off the floor. “Don’t you?” Mattley repeated. Through watering eyes, Alex only looked at him.

Again, Mattley reached for Alex’s hair, twisted, and pulled. “Answer me.” Again, Alex gave a slight nod after a moment and a gasp. “I’ll be generous, and not count that as a sound. Now, again, stand in the middle of the room.”

This time Alex hesitated. Mattley reached for Alex’s hair again. This time he didn’t pull it. He ran his fingers through the blonde’s hair, then held onto his head by the hair, firmly. With his other hand, he pulled the stick back, and then hit the hard of Alex’s head with the stick. Alex tried to roll with the blow, but the hand holding him in place didn’t give. “I said stand in the middle of the room. For a child spy, you aren’t very clever, are you?”

When Mattley released him, Alex took two slow steps into the middle of the room.

“Don’t move,” the man reminded him. Then he, again, hit Alex with the branch. It took three blows to completely knock him to the ground, this time, although with each blow it seemed he was going to fall for a moment, as he staggered from each impact. Two of the blows hit him in the head. By the time he landed on his side, tears were flowing, and his head _hurt._

The pain came in waves. He might have a concussion. If he didn’t, he might soon. Alex pushed himself to a sitting position then raised his hands to try and shield his head.

“Stand.”

Alex didn’t even attempt to move. “This is getting repetitive,” Mattley warned. “Why don’t we try something else?”

There was a small wardrobe at height with Alex’s shoulders standing against the wall. The man dragged Alex to it by the hair, Alex struggling to keep up with the man so his hair was yanked less viciously than it already had been. “Put your hands against the dresser.”

Mattley only waited a second before Alex’s inaction urged him into action. He grabbed Alex’s head and shoved it forward and down, into the dresser. “Seven,” Mattley said impatiently, when he heard the muffled intake for breath. “Now put your hands against the dresser.”

Alex shuddered.

Mattley aimed a blow at his legs, knocking Alex slightly sideways, into the drawer knobs. “Now.”

Slowly, Alex put his cuffed hands against the dresser and braced himself as best he could. Mattley, beside him, eyed the boy’s back, and raised the branch.

\--

If Yassen had his gun in his hand, there was a possibility that David would be dead the moment they were left alone in the dim school building.

It wasn’t the rational response. But the cold fury that had been rising inside of him was not the sort of emotion that listened to rationality.

David saw his expression, and must have realized how dangerously close he had been to losing his life. “We’re tracking him!” he stammered, quickly. “We didn’t just hand him over. Kofi’s nearby and tracking Alex.”

Yassen, unsure if he could trust himself to speak, nodded. Once.

“And I brought weapons,” David said, uncertainly. Perhaps he realized it was for the best if Yassen did not have a gun in his hand now.

Yassen took a deep breath. Calm. Focus. Alex was in danger, and hurting David would not solve the problem. Hurting Mattley, however, was a solution, and one that he should turn to. And quickly, before Alex proved too much of a bother for Mattley to keep alive.

They met the others two blocks away, in a run-down street of houses. They were waiting in a large yellow taxi, all with nervous expressions written clearly across their faces.

It would be a lie to reassure them. Alex, if Yassen’s first meeting with Mattley was any indication, would be either in significant amounts of pain right now, or he was about to be.

“Do you have him?” Yassen asked.

“Yes.”

Kofi handed his phone to Yassen. On the phone screen, on the map, was a blinking white light several kilometers away.

“Go there,” Yassen said in Spanish, passing the phone to the cab driver.

The GPS was able to navigate them to the street that Alex was on. It was even so specific as to indicate what building on the urban street would belong to Mattley: a mediocre hotel.

“What now?” Tomas asked, tense, after they had paid the driver.

“We wait,” Yassen answered. “Mattley’s man will show up here soon, or Mattley will need to leave to meet him. Tomas and I are going to wait in the hotel lobby, and the rest of you will wait in the parking garage.”

Kofi asked, “We can’t do something sooner? Can’t we ask what room he’s in and break in?”

“He will not be under his own name,” Yassen answered, impatient. “And if he we storm to his room, he will shoot Alex.” Alex, after all, was a risk to Mattley’s place at MI6. If Mattley had even a hope of surviving a shootout, he would want to make sure Alex was no longer a threat.

“And our goal is to get Alex alive?” Kofi prodded.

Yassen considered his words. Measured, he answered, “Alex will be alive. You do not want to find out what could happen should the alternative be true.”

None of his men appeared happy to wait. They still agreed to the plan. David and Yassen split the men – Tomas and Shen with David in the parking garage and Kofi with Yassen in the hotel lobby. David and Yassen would both recognize either Mattley or his backup, and so they waited.

Time passed at a crawl. Kofi’s leg fidgeted as the two sat in the lobby as if they were waiting for someone for legitimate reasons. Yassen, practiced with tense situations, was still.

He didn’t think of Alex’s possible condition. Mattley had said he would hurt Alex – that was enough to reassure. Alex would be hurt when he was found, yes. But he would be alive. That was what mattered.

Alex would be alive.

There were no other possibilities.

If Yassen had miscalculated, if Alex was in worse condition than he’d been the first time Mattley had taken his time with the boy, if Alex had been too much of a threat and it was too late –

No.

Alex was fine. Perhaps in pain, yes, but alive. The boy had been hurt before. He’d survive. And soon Mattley would be no more threat. Would be dead, as he should have been within seconds of their meeting at the school.

Mattley had said he would be meeting his man at 2:00. It was fifteen minutes before then that Yassen got the call – the man was in the parking garage, with David’s group.

Yassen’s breath hitched.

If Mattley said Alex was dead –

Yassen didn’t ask over the phone.

The walk to the parking garage felt much longer than one flight down the stairs and a short hallway deserved.

“Over here,” Tomas called, the moment they entered the garage.

Mattley was sitting in the back of a run-down car, with David pressing a gun into his side. Shen was on the other side of Mattley, sandwiching the man squarely into the backseat with no escape. Yassen got into the driver’s seat, then turned around to face the man.

“Alex’s alive,” David said, before Yassen could ask.

Mattley didn’t protest.

Yassen took the man in. He was pale, and trembling, and seemed barely able to muster the energy to take in Yassen.

“He won’t run away, even if he has the chance,” David said.

A long knife was stuck through the man’s shoe and into his foot. The man’s dark shoes didn’t show any blood, but the interior car light indicated a small pool of the red liquid seeping into the back carpet of the car.

“Where is Alex?” Yassen asked, without preamble.

“Wh-what’s it to you?” Mattley asked, before gasping a pained laugh. “All this for a fucking child. He’s not anyone.”

Voice ice, Yassen repeated the question. “Where is he?”

Mattley bared his teeth.

Shen reached to Mattley’s head, and put his hand around the side of it. He put his thumb over one of Mattley’s eyes, and began to press in, lightly. “Where’s the damn kid?”

Ugly anger flashed through the pain on the man’s face. “He’s in my room. He’s cuffed to the bed.”

“Which room?”

“Two hundred and five.”

Shen drew his hand away.

“Room key,” Yassen instructed.

Mattley fumbled for his pocket.

“Careful,” David instructed. “You don’t want a hole in your hand as well.”

The room key was found after a moment, and held forward. Yassen took it, and opened the driver’s seat to get out. Before he left, he ordered, “Keep him here. Alive.”

Tomas followed Yassen back into the hotel. Yassen led the way to the stairs. He wasn’t running. But his stride was, undeniably, quick.

Room 205 was one of ten rooms on that side of the hall. A piece of paper on the doorknob read, in Spanish, ‘Do Not Disturb’. Tomas knocked first. “Cleaning,” he called in Spanish.

Yassen waited only five seconds.

It would be logical to wait longer. To give anyone inside, if this was the wrong room, or someone else was inside, a chance to respond.

Alex could be inside.

He could be hurt.

The keycard opened the door.

Alex wasn’t inside.

“Alex?” Tomas called, stepping in behind Yassen, as they took the scene in.

Someone had dragged the entire bed around, so that the footboard was next to the night table. It would have taken immense strength for a few seconds, but that was no surprise. Adrenaline gave people that strength, from time to time.

The rest was not a puzzle. A pair of handcuffs was dangling from the carved wooden footboard of the bed. The other half of the cuffs was open. The drawer of the nightstand was open. A broken pen lay on the ground, next to two discarded ties.

On the floor in the rest of the room, beside a dresser, lay two halves of a broken and thick branch.

Alex had been inside. He had been cuffed to the bed. He had probably been beaten, he had assuredly been gagged, and Mattley had made a mistake all too common to the men who attempted to hold Alex against his will: Mattley had assumed Alex was not a problem on his own.

“He’s not in the bathroom,” Tomas said, as if that had been a possibility at all.

Yassen’s eyes fell onto a small white square on the floor. The tracking device, he was willing to bet.

Alex wasn’t dead, it was true.

Yet once again, Alex Rider had become a risk to Yassen’s operation.


	12. Bruises

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are a few Spanish words/phrases in this chapter, and they have been translated for me with the help of the wonderful two people known as Lil_Lupin and Laxiflorum.

Alex wanted to run down the street, ignoring how much everything hurt in favor of getting as far away from the hotel as possible, but he forced himself to walk as calmly as he could. There was nothing to be gained from attracting attention. Alex had taken a quick glance at himself in the room’s mirror before he’d ran out of the hotel – receptionist staring at him as he left the lobby - and he knew he looked a mess already. Bruises were forming all over his arms, and one was already almost clear across his right temple. Gingerly, he reached for the back of his head.

Fuck.

It hurt. His hair might be covering the back of his head, but there was a bruise there, and a large one, based on how it felt.

Calm. Walk as if he belonged. Walk as if he knew where he was going.

Well, at least that was one positive to the situation – he hadn’t been blindfolded on the drive there, and he had seen a large brick building labeled ‘Biblioteca’ around the corner. A library. Someone there had to be able to lend him a phone, or maybe there would be a payphone at the building, and he could appear desperate enough to borrow some coins. Or he could call collect, and hope Mrs. Jones would pick up.

Although a few other pedestrians shot alarmed glances at Alex as he rounded the corner and walked to the library, no one stopped him. For once, Alex was grateful that most people didn’t often take initiative when they thought something was wrong.

Inside the library, Alex walked straight to the librarian’s desk. A short woman with red spectacles glanced up at him, at first without much care, and then, after she took in his ripped shirt and his bruises, with alarm. In faulty Spanish, Alex stuttered out that he needed to hide and needed to borrow a phone to call for help. He couldn’t quite understand the woman’s response, but it obviously a concerned affirmative.

Alex followed the librarian to a back room. She closed the door behind them and, finally, he felt a sense of relief. The room was filled with book carts and it had 2 desks pushed along the wall, with a few meters of space between them. No one else was in the room.

The librarian led him to the furthest desk and pulled the chair out for Alex to sit down. After he was seated, she asked him, “¿Estás bien?” _Are you alright?_

Trying to make his words easily understood despite the obvious dialectical differences, Alex said he would be alright soon.

“¿Vas a llamar a la policía?” she responded. _Will you call the police?_

“Sí,” Alex said. “Despues de llmar a una amiga.” _Yes, after I call a friend._ Which wasn’t really his plan, but he assumed Mrs. Jones would transfer him to the police, or maybe to someone at the nearest embassy, once he said where he was, to the best of his knowledge. Or once his call was tracked.

Concerned, the librarian handed her cell phone to Alex, then explained, if Alex was understanding correctly, that she would be at the front if he needed her. Then she left the room, closing the door softly behind her.

For the first time in days, Alex felt safe. It was over. He would be home soon, and Mattley would be dealt with – if the tracker had worked – and if Mrs. Jones could figure out what Yassen and his crew were up to, all the better.

Alex dialed the number he had to contact Mrs. Jones.

She picked up immediately.

“Hello?” the familiar voice asked.

“Mrs. Jones!” Alex exclaimed, unable to contain his relief. “I need help.”

“Alex, are you alright?”

“Yeah, but I almost wasn’t. Your agent came after me!”

There was a brief pause on the other end, and then Mrs. Jones asked, “Is this about Mattley again?”

“Do you have any other agents that tried to frame me?” Honestly, if there were, Alex wouldn’t be surprised at this point. Although he hoped there weren’t. With the luck he sometimes had, perhaps Mattley had been the lone traitor in MI6’s ranks.

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know.” Alex studied the books on the cart behind the desk. They were a varied bunch. “He might be dead. Yassen’s crew gave me up to him, but they were tracking me. Mattley beat me up then left to meet his partner, and I escaped. I left the tracker where he’d kept me, though, so Yassen probably knows where to find him”

“You think he’ll be killed?” Her clipped, professional tone gave no indication of whether that was deemed acceptable or not.

“I don’t know,” Alex said, frustrated. “I don’t know if the tracker worked. I asked Yassen not to kill him, but then Mattley forced his crew to give me up. Yassen didn’t look happy about it. So yeah, he’s probably dead, or he will be soon.” Alex couldn’t bring himself to care. Although at first he’d wanted proof that he’d been set up without blood, he had also wanted to be home ages ago, and not to have been beaten blue while unable to even protest the treatment.

“And right now, I’m assuming that you are in a safe place?”

“I think so.”

“Alright. Tell me everything.”

Where should he even start? Alex assumed he should leave out paying Yassen to deal with Mattley, so perhaps he’d skirt around that and just say what he knew. “I’m in Mexico. Trace this call and you’ll know where, because I don’t know exactly, and I don’t know why we stopped here. All I know is that Mattley came here to meet Yassen. And the plan they’re involved with has something to do with computers and RAMs. I overheard them talking about it, but that’s all I understood. Yassen thought I knew more though, because he was going to keep me on the boat until I guess his plan was over. Mattley held Yassen hostage until his crew gave me up, and then Mattley beat me up in a hotel room, and then I escaped, and now I’m hiding in a library.”

By the end he was rambling, he knew. The long pause on the end of the call seemed to indicate that Mrs. Jones was taking her time to understand the story.

“I’m ready to go home now,” Alex said, tired, into the phone.

Mrs. Jones spoke without emotion. “That may not be possible quite yet.”

A sudden breath hitched in his throat. “Yes, it is. I’m not safe staying here, not for long. If Yassen or Mattley find me, they’ll both hurt me. Mattley will kill me if he’s even still alive. Yassen will drag me back to the ship if he thinks there’s anything that I haven’t told you yet. And I won’t be home for a month after that, at least.”

“It still may not be possible.”

“Why not?” Alex asked, unsteadily.

“You just told me that one my agents may be dead. If that is the case, one of the last things that agent did before he died was accuse you of working for enemies of the state, and now he’s dead. My superiors will want a full investigation, and in the meantime, you will need to be kept in prison.”

The world span.

“I did everything you asked! Mattley’s not a problem anymore.”

“Do you have proof that he was a traitor?”

Yassen should have proof. Alex had paid him to find proof.

Yassen had no reason to help Alex, not after he’d run to Mrs. Jones and told her everything he knew about the man’s operation. And Alex didn’t even have a way to contact Yassen except for finding the boat at the dockyard.

“No,” Alex admitted.

“Then I have no proof to give my superiors. Meanwhile, you know something is still wrong. You told me computers are involved, and RAMs. Do you know anything more?”

He didn’t, but he wished desperately that he knew the entire plot. Maybe if he did, he could persuade Mrs. Jones to let him go home if he gave that information up.

His silence, however, spoke for itself. He’d given everything he knew up already.

“Alex,” Mrs. Jones said intently. “You know about computers from your first mission. You know that Yassen Gregorovich is not a man to be trusted. I have a suspicion that if you’re in Mexico right now, it’s because of the computers that our government just ordered for the treasury. The potential for Britain to be badly hurt by terrorists who control government computers cannot be understated.”

“I just want to go home.”

“I know, and believe me, I wish you could go home as well. But right now, we need you find Gregorovich. Convince him that he needs to keep you. And find out what is happening and stop it.”

“No. I’m not helping you. You said I could be done.” He knew Mrs. Jones wasn’t going to give him up, not anytime soon, but couldn’t he at least have a break? A chance to go home and hug Jack?

Alex was tired. He was hurt. He was stranded in a foreign country.

He didn’t need to be forced back into a hostage situation just to help the treasury department.

“You’re the only one Gregorovich will let live.”

“I don’t care. I choose prison. Do your investigation, find out I’m innocent, then let me go.”

Alex listened to steady breathing on the other end of the line. Then Mrs. Jones spoke, sharply. “And how are you getting to Britain to be arrested? Do you have a passport? A way to get home?”

“I’m only here because of you,” Alex pleaded.

“Yes, because you agreed to help us investigate a smuggling ring. The mission isn’t over.”

“You said I would only help out during break! School’s been back in session for days!”

“Unfortunately, the parameters of missions sometimes change depending on the circumstances.”

“Is blackmailing teenagers the changing circumstances?”

“I’m sorry, Alex. Rest assured that when you help us take down whoever is running this operation, I will use it as proof to clear your name to my superiors.”

“Yassen might not even still be here!”

“Perhaps not. In that case, we will figure out a way to move forward.”

“Please don’t do this,” Alex said, desperately. “You told me I could say no!”

“And then you accepted my mission. You have my number. Call me when you have information, or if you get stuck.” And then Mrs. Jones hung up.

Alex stared at the phone in his hand. He noticed, distantly, that his hand was trembling.

This was supposed to be over.

Numbly, he keyed in the number to call Jack. He needed to tell her it was time to visit her family in America; Alex wouldn’t be coming home anytime soon.

\--

This morning, David had known exactly how the day would go. By early afternoon, it had taken a turn. And by evening, the entire day had turned into a wreck that he could never have anticipated. By the time they’d returned to the boat at night and David was able to call his daughter, certain events had transpired that he suspected none of them would have guessed that morning.

Alex was gone. They had searched around the hotel for a few hours, and made visits to local hospitals and police stations. From the description Mattley had given before Gregorovich had disposed of him, Alex probably wouldn’t have needed a hospital, but he was sporting bruises that would stand out. No one in the area mentioned seeing a bruised and lone teenager.

At least he was alive. Tomas, Kofi, and even Shen to some degree had been relieved at the news. And it was true that none of them wanted the boy dead. Still, David suspected that the rest of the crew didn’t understand the implications of a teenager who worked for MI6 and had information on their plans running free.

Gregorovich had been colder and more distant than David had seen him yet after he’d come down to the parking garage and stated that that Alex was gone. When David had suggested they might need to leave that night in case Alex had alerted the local police to suspicious activity, Gregorovich had stared him down and said they would stay until they had the satellite installed the next day. Then the man had suggested that if they were worried about the police, they could stand guard by the boat during the night.

It was not a suggestion to ignore.

David had, after calling his daughter, taken the second shift of standing on the deck with an umbrella in the humid and gently drizzling night. Although at first there was frequent movement as people walked around the dock, going to and from their own boats, no one arose David’s suspicions. And then, as it got later and later, there was almost no movement at all.

The dockyard lamps illuminated the lone figure approaching the beginning of the pier around eleven. David squinted. By now the drizzling rain had become constant enough that even just walking without an umbrella seemed unusual. Let alone walking without an umbrella down a dimly lit pier close to midnight, with no one else around.

The figure trudged halfway down the pier and to their yacht before David recognized him.

He took a step forward, and then another. “Alex?” he called, as loud as he dared without trying to wake anyone on nearby boats.

Alex came forward without talking, getting closer until at last the boy was in front of the yacht.

The night wasn’t cold – far from it – but Alex was slightly shaking. He was soaked through, his shirt was torn, bruises ran up both of his arms, and a dark mark decorated his temple. His tired expression suggested that a pillow and a blanket would help more than anything.

David, knowing it did no good, walked off the deck and onto the pier to move his umbrella over Alex. “Where have you been?”

“I need to talk to Yassen,” Alex said quietly, ignoring the question.

The boss would probably want to talk to the boy as well. David led them into the boat and then down to the lower level, leaving the umbrella outside.

It was late and the boat was mostly quiet, although they passed the sounds of a Chinese movie when they passed through the top level. It had been a long day, and tomorrow would be another. David knew that at least Tomas was asleep.

David hesitated before he knocked on Gregorovich’s door. The man had been in a clear foul mood the entire afternoon. How much of his mood would he put on Alex?

Alex saw the hesitation. Tired resentment passed over the boy’s face as he stood, shivering now even more in the air-conditioning, and waiting for the blow to fall.

He couldn’t put off the inevitable forever. David knocked, softly, a few times. The door opened when he was mid-knock.

Gregorovich was still dressed. He appeared awake enough. His gaze landed on Alex.

There wasn’t a single flicker of appreciation that Alex was alive.

“Is anyone else with you?” the man asked.

“No.”

“Are the police going to show up soon?”

Alex shook his head. His tense shoulders made it clear that he understood this was not a small question.

Softly, Gregorovich asked, “And why should I believe you?”

“I’m telling the truth. I didn’t talk to anyone in this country about you. And the person I talked to didn’t care about sending police after you.” Alex shifted. “I need to talk to you. Alone.”

“I didn’t see anyone else,” David said, reiterating what Alex had said.

“Please can we talk?” Alex repeated. There was a note in his voice that David hadn’t heard before.

Gregorovich nodded. “You’ll change first. Your clothes are still upstairs. Come back here when you’re dry. David, watch the door. If Alex tries to leave, bring him to me.”

“I won’t,” Alex said. “I don’t have anywhere to go.”

“All the same. Watch him.”

\--

David was gazing out the window in the yacht’s door into the darkness outside when Alex headed down the stairs, alone. His hair was still damp, but the fresh clothes were dry. The navy jumper he’d been borrowing from Yassen since his second day on the ship at least hid the worst of the bruises, ignoring the one on his face.

The door to Yassen’s room was open. Alex still stopped in the doorway and waited until Yassen beckoned him in. Alex closed the door behind him when he entered.

Yassen was already sitting in the desk chair. To be polite, Alex should probably stay standing. But he was tired. He’d been walking for hours across town, and not always in the right direction after a few people had been confused about where the dock had been. Without asking, Alex perched on the edge of the bed.

Better to pull the bandage off in one rip than drag the process out. Without delaying, Alex said, “I called Mrs. Jones and told her everything. She knows that you’re doing something with computers and RAMs. But that’s all I knew. I told you I didn’t know much.”

Yassen only looked at him.

“Is Mattley dead?” Alex asked.

“Yes.”

“I told Mrs. Jones that I thought he was.” Alex crossed his arms defensively. “She said it made me look suspicious. She threatened to arrest me if I didn’t go back to you, and stop whatever you’re doing with computers.”

When Yassen didn’t respond, Alex resisted the urge to flinch. “Are you going to say anything? Mrs. Jones told me to come back here, or she’d arrest me. And I told her everything I knew. If you’re going to hit me, just do it already.”

“I’m not going to hit you,” Yassen said. “But I don’t know why you came back. You told what you knew to MI6, so I have no more reason to hold you here. And as we discussed, your dealings with your boss are not my problem.”

“You’re heading to England, I think. Based on what the crew has said. You could take me with you.”

“No. You would continue to be a risk. Jones asked you to come back because she hoped that you would interfere; now I have no reason to put up with that risk.”

“I don’t have anywhere to go,” Alex said. He could hear his voice tremble.

“That’s not my problem. You paid me to help you deal with Mattley. He has been dealt with, although circumstances dictated that I handle it differently than you first requested. You are also not my prisoner anymore.”

Looking to Yassen for compassion had been a mistake from the start. Alex dug his fingers into his arms. Hushed, he asked, “Can I at least sleep here? It’s raining outside.” And perhaps the bigger problem lay in that Alex didn’t know where to go. This had been the only option he knew of.

Yassen inclined his head. “You’ll stay here until tomorrow when I tell you it’s time to leave. So that I know that you do not decide that now would be the time to call the police.”

The generosity.

Now wasn’t the time for sarcasm.

“Ok,” Alex said, still in a low voice.

“You can go upstairs now,” Yassen dismissed.

Wordlessly, Alex uncrossed his arms and left the room.

Upstairs, Shen was sitting on the couch, watching a Chinese movie. Alex sat down at the other side of the leather couch. He grabbed the blanket and wrapped it around himself.

“I heard you were alright,” Shen said, without pausing the movie or looking over.

Alex didn’t feel alright.

“I’m finishing my movie,” the man said, when Alex was silent. “I’m not turning the volume down.”

Alex wouldn’t be able to get to sleep soon anyway, even with the bone deep weariness. There were too many potential outcomes hovering over his head.

“There are no subtitles,” Shen added.

“That’s fine,” Alex said. He leaned against the back of the couch. “I think background noise would be good right now.”

“Don’t talk through the movie.”

For the first time since morning, Alex almost smiled. At least some things were consistent today.

\--

Yassen first checked on Alex after waking that morning. He was still awake when Yassen found him, and looking at a football magazine he’d been given at least a few days before. “Sleep,” Yassen had told Alex, and he had taken the magazine. The next time he had checked on Alex, he was asleep.

Alex slept through the men organizing the day’s tasks and the final errands to run before they left that evening. It was nearing three in the afternoon, close to when they would be leaving, when Yassen woke Alex up.

For someone who had slept most of the day away, Alex woke reluctantly, opening his eyes only after Yassen said that he would want to eat before he left.

David was in the kitchen already, checking over the inventory list.

“You know where the food is,” Yassen told Alex. “Make yourself something that takes less than an hour. You’re leaving soon.”

“Where are you going?” David asked, ignoring the half completed inventory. Not that it could be completed until Tomas returned from the store, anyway.

Alex shrugged.

“He’ll figure it out,” Yassen said.

Alex, slowly, made himself a sandwich.

“You have to eat more than that,” David said. “When was the last time you ate?”

“This morning.”

The room was quiet as Alex ate, although David glanced up at Alex more than was needed just to make sure he was out of trouble.

“Should I go now?” Alex asked, once he’d finished his food.

“Wait.”

“Ok,” Alex said.

Something was off in his tone. Something more than tiredness.

“Do you have any spare change?” Alex asked. “ I’d say I’d borrow it, but,” Alex shrugged. “You probably won’t get it back. But even just a few pesos. Please.”

“Where are you going again?” David repeated. He sounded worried. 

“Probably prison,” Alex said. “I don’t know where else to go. And that’s assuming I can get back to England. Since I don't have any money or a passport, I don't know how to even do that.”

The concern on David’s face was rapidly morphing into another expression. “Why aren’t you staying here?”

“There’s no reason to keep him,” Yassen said.

David frowned. “He gave himself up for you.”

Alex looked away.

“He would have given himself up to keep anyone from being hurt.”

“Isn’t that worse?” David questioned.

Still purposively not looking at anyone, Alex asked, “When do I need to leave?”

“ _Wait._ I will tell you when to go.” Annoyed, Yassen looked at David. “Keep him in here.”

Downstairs, Yassen set a timer on his watch for half an hour. At that point, Alex would be safe to leave, if Tomas was back by then. Then Yassen picked up his book and tried to resume from where he’d left last night.

Thirty minutes later, he had read ten pages, and couldn’t remember any of them. Yet another grievance to lay on Alex’s feet.

Yassen returned to the kitchen with his mind made up.

“If you stay, and you cause problems, I will have you hurt until you wish that you had left,” he said once he had Alex’s attention.

Alex stared. “Ok.”

“You will be a prisoner,” Yassen warned.

“I’m staying,” Alex said immediately.

“If he stays, and he causes problems, it will still be the crew that hurts him,” Yassen said, this time to David. “It will still be the crew in charge of watching him.”

“He doesn’t have anywhere else to go,” David said, as if that settled everything.

“You will tell the others, then.” Yassen glanced at Alex. “Are you still tired?”

“Yeah.”

“Go back to sleep.”

\--

Tomas had known that Alex was back since the beginning of the day, when he’d noticed an Alex-sized body laying on the couch under a blanket and then entered the kitchen to be told by Shen that the boy was back. But then running errands on shore had kept Tomas away from the boat all day, and by the time he returned that evening, Alex was nowhere to be seen. According to David, he was with the boss.

And now it was nearing one in the morning, they were a few hours into the journey across the Atlantic, and Alex had still not appeared.

Tomas was playing cards with David and Kofi when his anxious mind returned, not for the first time of the evening, to Alex.

“I think I’m ready to go to bed,” David said, laying down his cards.

“Coward. You’re afraid of my cards,” Kofi retorted.

“What can I say,” David accepted. “My hands were shit tonight.”

Kofi began to collect all the cards to put them away. “Ah, well. It happens. Tonight, my hand was best. Tomorrow yours might be. And bed is starting to sound good.”

“What about Alex?” Tomas asked.

“What about him?”

“Aren’t we still in charge of watching him?”

“Sure,” Kofi said. “If he’s anywhere to be found. He’s with Gregorovich. The boss will get us if he needs a hand.”

“You could go ask about him,” David suggested.

“Yeah.” Tomas could. And he might. He didn’t have any reason to avoid it, and Gregorovich might appreciate – long shot though it seemed – that Tomas was ready to watch the young prisoner. If Alex even was a prisoner at this point. David had said he was; he’d said Alex had appeared last night, after Tomas was asleep, and this morning Gregorovich had told David that the boy was to be treated exactly as before his grand disappearing act. Yet Tomas couldn’t help wondering what sort of prisoner volunteered to come back to a prison.

“Go do it if you’re worried.” Unsaid seemed to be the thought that the worst that could happen was Tomas wouldn’t learn much. Although the worst that could happen was likely to be a bit worse than that – Gregorovich did not seem the sort to want to be bothered for no reason.

Kofi sensed his hesitation. “Just ask if Alex needs a minder. It will let us figure out the schedule for tonight.”

Tomas nodded, agreeing before he’d thought it through. It would be simple. Just a quick check in.

Downstairs, Tomas knocked on the boss’s door, almost softly. He wasn’t sure he’d been heard at first.

Gregorovich opened the door enough to be seen. “Yes?”

The sound of music – familiar, in a distant way – drifted out of the room.

“I wanted to check on if Alex was here, and needed anyone to watch him.”

Gregorovich pushed open the door completely. Inside the room, Tomas could see a bed and a desk. On the bed, Alex was laying down with his head resting on his arms at the foot of the bed. A dark bruise covered what Tomas could see of Alex’s temple. The boy was watching a movie from a laptop placed on the desk. A quick glance of a rainforest on screen didn’t at first bring to Tomas’s mind the movie, and then the scene shifted to show a small dinosaur skitter across the screen.

“I think I can watch a half-sleeping fifteen year old.”

Fifteen.

The age felt familiar, as if Tomas had known it once. If he had, he’d forgotten the number.

Fifteen was young.

“Is that all?”

“Is he alright?” Tomas asked. The bruise would imply that Alex had been hurt. David hadn’t mentioned that detail when recounting Alex’s return.

“You would need to ask him that.”

Tomas cleared his throat. “Alex, are you alright?”

On the bed, still looking at the screen, Alex lifted a shoulder in what could have been a shrug.

“Do you like Jurassic Park?”

“Do you need anything else?” Gregorovich interrupted.

Stealing one final glimpse at the kid, Tomas admitted, “No.”

The door was shut in his face, firmly.

\--

The movie was over, not that Yassen was paying it any attention. Tuning out the background credit song, he read, enjoying his book.

On the bed, Alex’s face was half buried in his arms, pressed against the foot of the bed. Eventually he spoke, his words were muffled by the arm over his mouth. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Yassen reached for his bookmark. “For what?”

“For a month in the middle of the ocean.”

It may not, depending on conditions, be a month. But it also could be. Yassen said nothing about the timeframe, not intending to set Alex up for disappointment. “There are movies on board.”

“Great,” Alex muttered. “Because your crew has such good taste in movies.”

“You picked this one.”

“This is the first time I had a choice. Are you going to let me watch pirated movies every day?”

No, and they both knew it.

“Read. I’ll pass my book to you when I finish it.”

“Is it about ways to kill people?”

“No.”

“About ways to torture people?”

Yassen turned the book’s cover to face Alex. “It’s a mystery. You may hate it less than you think.”

“Huh.” Alex squinted. “I thought you mainly were learning languages.”

“I have an advanced language textbook as well.”

Alex shifted the conversation. “Soon I get a mystery book. That’s great. One distraction down. But how am I supposed to tolerate a month at sea when I hate your crew?’

It had been Alex’s choice to stay. Though, as both knew, there hadn’t been much of a choice at all. “You hate all of them?”

“Did I tell you what they threatened to do?”

“No.”

“Kofi and David thought I’d overheard them talking, but they were speaking in Spanish. I told them I didn’t know Spanish. So they threatened to cut my other arm open just for hearing them, but they threatened in Spanish.”

“You had overheard them,” Yassen pointed out.

Alex rubbed his eyes, slowly, with the palm of a hand. “The right response when someone says they were threatened isn’t ‘they were right to threaten you’.”

“I didn’t say they were.”

“You were probably thinking it,” Alex accused. “And you would have done the same thing.”

“I imagine I could avoid the threat of torture.”

“Sure, maybe you wouldn’t _mention_ torture. But the threat would be there.”

Yassen didn’t deny it. “I hope we will avoid having more of those unpleasant instances.”

“I got beat up for you,” Alex muttered. “You could have more sympathy than just ‘I hope I don’t have to torture you’.”

“Alex. I _am_ glad that you’re safe.”

“Until I’m back in England and MI6 calls again.”

“I’m not the person who can help you with that.”

Alex closed his eyes for a moment. “No one is.”

“You’re safe for now,” Yassen reminded him. Although they both knew the rest of that sentence – Alex was safe, so long as he behaved. “You should get ready for bed.”

“I’m not tired.” Alex buried his head in his arms completely, before half raising his head again, eyes peeking out from behind his bangs. “I’d rather watch another movie.”

“It’s after midnight.”

Alex rolled his eyes. “We’re on a boat out at sea. I don’t need to be up in the morning.”

“You do if whoever’s watching you decides they don’t want to watch a sleeping teenager.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Perhaps they would rather not sit by the couch all day.”

“I won’t complain if I’m tired tomorrow. And there’s a sequel, while you’re pirating movies on the high seas.”

The first movie had been easy enough to tune out and read, and Yassen wasn’t tired either. Perhaps this once, it would be acceptable to keep Alex up. Yassen put his book aside and reached for the laptop, but not without a final warning. “If you fall asleep, I’m waking you to go upstairs.”

"I won't. After the sequel, there's a third as well."

"No."

"Fine." Alex subsided into quiet as Yassen began the download of the second Jurassic Park movie. Behind him, he heard Alex shift. "You could have left me alone in Mexico."

"I could have." 

"I thought you were going to leave me," Alex admitted.

"It was my plan. It would have been smarter to leave you."

Alex's smile was hidden behind his arms, but Yassen could almost hear the smirk. "I'm really good at messing up plans."

"I'm aware."

"I'm really not going to be a problem." Alex sounded sincere. "I'm not going to help Mrs. Jones, not when she threatened to put me in prison if I didn't help her."

"We'll see."

"It's fine if you don't believe me. But I won't." 

"Alright," Yassen accepted. "You won't be a problem. Now let me start the movie, so I can finish my book." 


End file.
